Amitai Etzioni, author of Security First: For a Muscular, Moral Foreign Policy, was a recent guest blogger for The Huffington Post. The article, called “An Honesty Test for Politicians,” begins:

In the course of this campaign season many questions have been raised about the character of the various candidates for public office. We are sure to hear much more about their personal integrity and the veracity of specific claims they make. The test I recommend is simple: It asks whether a person who is seeking to lead us has the courage to come clean with the American people and tell one and all that we must take a bitter medicine–namely, that we must impose a hefty tax on oil. He or she can soften the blow by listing all the good things that would follow from such a tax, but would have to add that we also must give up on our romance with the automobile.

Continue reading “An Honesty Test for Politicians.”

Amitai Etzioni is a Professor of International Relations at the George Washington University. Among his books are From Empire to Community, Political Unification Revisited, Winning Without War, and The Common Good. He served as a Senior Aid to the White House and as President of the American Sociological Association. He taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Berkeley. He was listed as one of the top 100 American intellectuals in Richard Posner’s book Public Intellectuals.