Accountability is a new favorite buzzword. It is designed to suggest that an enterprise is prompted to behave responsibly and serve the public interest, as if being able to provide an account of activity is a guarantee that an account is provided and that doing so affects performance in any way. It doesn’t, especially if the account is a web of lies.

So, it seems fair to conclude that accountability is like regulation, a word favored by the bureaucracy caught between an allegiance to commerce and the expectations of a citizenry newly alert to its governance.

Then too, there is the understandable reluctance on the part of bureaucracies to shift from being enablers of commerce to imposing restraints. Being a regulator is a lot more fun (merits more rewards) than being a wetblanket.

That’s a problem. Donald Trump and his cohorts identified a corrupt bureaucracy, but what they meant was that commercial interests were no longer as well served as previously. Meanwhile, the newly alerted citizenry has not quite figured out where the problem lies. That the Constitution set up a commercial corporation was not widely publicized.