Ethical questions can be complicated, thorny things.  But here’s an issue that’s really easy to spot.

If you give a group of people the ability to take other people’s treasure whenever they find it — cash, houses, cars, boats — and keep it all, without having to do much to justify it, then they will.  We’re talking money and cars and homes, and in the end, people’s lives.  They’ll take whatever they can, over and over.  You guarantee predation.

And yet, we do it all the time, and pretend to be surprised when the courts tangle poor people in endless fines and penalties.  Why?  Because they can, and they need the money to pay their salaries.  Every town has become a speed trap town.  They don’t care about the hard, assuming that because they have the ability, it must be right.

The worst example are the asset seizure laws.  Everyone seems to have realized that, and stopping it has become one of the few bipartisan issues we have.

Which makes Jeff Sessions declaration that he’s expanding the practice openly evil.  I wish I could be funnier about it, but if you’ve ever been caught in the legal system and you’re not a rich white guy, you know how helpless you are.  It’s simply awful.  The authorities will grind you into bloody sludge for the slightest mistake, and they spread traps and decoys in your path.

There are reasons why so many people are so angry about the law and how we use it.  Baltimore just caught a cop that planted drugs for a fake bust.  Back in January, the cops grabbed their suspect, and while everyone stood around, one cop went into an alley.  He planted a bottle of pills under some trash, came back out into the street, turned on his body camera, said his line (“I’m gonna go check here!”), then went back into the alley as the host of his own “Look what I found!” video.  They arrested the guy, who’s been in jail since January because he can’t pay the $50K bail.  After six months locked up, most of what he had — reputation, money, job, home, marriage, really, most of his life.

What the good officer didn’t know is that the body cameras automatically saves the 30 seconds before he turned it on.  When they finally reviewed the body camera footage, they had a perfect seat to him planting the drugs.  Busted.

And some of us couldn’t hep but notice that all the other officers involved in the bust watched this creep plant his drugs, clearly doctor up a recording, and then backed him up.  They agreed with everything.  They allowed the guy to be arrested, charged, and then rot in jail for months on what they knew were fake charges.  I’m sure they would have testified against him.

There just wasn’t a question.  Of course they backed each other up.  It’s what you do.  And so far, they haven’t been charged.

So why would they do that?  Because they get emotional pleasure from busting people, right or wrong?  A perverted sense of entitlement?

Or because arresting people brings in tons of money.

Trump represents the very worst of us so accurately, it’s like he’s aiming to be the anti-President.