One topic that has dominated the last decade-plus of political life is the will-it-happen or won't-it-happen of the release of a former president's tax returns. (Amendment: it eventually happened.) When this first came up, this former president was a candidate - and an outside shot at that. The documents were desired because it might show some unsuitableness (i.e. criminal, or at least shady, financial activity) for the candidate to hold the office in question - arguably the single most powerful position on the planet.

Let's set aside for a minute the question of why we have a government institution, in an executive role - one which was given the explicit power to pursue such allegations - that does not also have the apparent capability to execute on that mandate, and instead confine ourselves to asking the question 'On what philosophical basis are we grounding the secrecy of these documents in the first place?' The obvious answer is the 'right to privacy' and we start to see the tension between rights and power, and why our conception of the relationship between these things, as a culture, might be flawed.

I would state our understanding as this; first you are a citizen, and granted some set of rights by the Constitution. (I will also set aside the fact that privacy is not specifically and explicitly enumerated for this discussion - it is culturally and legally held to be a right.) Then, we say, a citizen may run for and assume a political office, which grants them some set of policy-making powers. The act of the second does not in any way reduce the grant of the first. In this manner the politician becomes strictly more privileged than your average citizen.

If the recent deluge of dystopian superhero stories is tip toeing around anything, it is the notion that person A having strictly more privilege (power) than person B is a recipe for bad behavior. This specific privilege - the right to privacy - is an excellent example. Being a politician - or even simply running for office - provides a person not only with their normal citizen's rights to privacy but also a further shield: other government entities are dissuaded from investigating you simply because of the appearance of impropriety.

That stance in and of itself is not wrong-headed: if an elected politician that wields some lever of government can use that against their opponents, getting that position also gives them means to entrench themselves in that position. This sort of calcification is exactly the sort of governmental disease that democracy is meant to counter. It is appropriate that the Department of Justice can't just persecute any random political opponent, and appropriate that it go out of it's way to not appear to be doing so.

Still, what that means is that if a politician does do a crime, it becomes particularly hard to hold them accountable. They are shielded by not only their universally-granted rights (at least, we pretend they are universally granted - in truth those in power find that they have these rights more universally than others), but the additional rights granted those in power. This, nevermind the power itself.

This seems wrong - if only because it means that those harmed by a politicians crime (either acutely or the polity as a whole) are effectively shown to have fewer rights than those in power. We talk a great deal about the need for power to be answerable to the people, but it is in it's nature to seek a situation that is exactly the opposite that. And, to our universal harm, we seem unwilling to oppose this notion.

I would therefore like to propose a different way of thinking about this: a law akin to the temperature-pressure-volume law of ideal gasses. That is, in an ideal, uncorrupted government position, there is a relationship between the power that position possesses, the responsibilities required by that position, and the rights (specifically to privacy) afforded the holder of that position.

As the responsibility of a position increases, so does the required power to execute that position. This is reversible: the more power granted a position, the more responsibility the holder has for utilizing that power appropriately (and therefore the more liability they should come under for misuse). Further, these are inversely proportional to the amount of privacy they can claim.

It is ridiculous that the supreme commander of the most powerful armed forces on the planet can claim much privacy. We should know all there is to know about their communications, their finances, their actions. Where there is a security interest, we can proxy that knowledge through oversight appointees, but there should, ultimately, be no question who and what is influencing such an official. When there is a conflict, it should be pursued with real force of law.

We do this already in certain, clunky ways (such as disclosure forms), but these are notoriously poor enforcement tools - and it's clear that elected officials experience (sometimes radical) increase in net worth, without the public really ever able to achieve awareness as to whether this is due to undue influence on that politician, or if they are mis-using their power, or if it's a legitimate set of good choices on their part. (Narrator: it was not, it turns out, a legitimate set of good choices. Statistically speaking, that would be impossible.)

Of course, we can't get to that sort of parity between those governed and those governing unless we abandon - or at least greatly modify - our sense of what sort of privacy these officials are entitled to. Yes, it is hard to live without privacy, but that should be seen a cost of existing in one of these very-powerful positions. All too often we allow the powerful to externalize the responsibility for their use of power to others, or to use their power to get enhanced privacy and protection from answering for their actions. The only way to counter this is to change the basic contract by which they are granted that power: one that includes the actual transparency necessary to ensure they are acting in the best interests of us all.