Radwanski to account are those renowned moral authorities, members of the Parliament of Canada.

If the issue is helping yourself to public funds, after all, these people are the experts. It was just two years ago that MPs voted themselves a 20% pay raise, barely pausing to debate the matter before skipping town for the summer. Mr. Radwanski has owned the headlines for a month for actions alleged to have cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars. But MPs, by this one decision, are into the public for millions, every single year. And it doesn't end there. Just this month, Parliament bent itself to the mighty task of passing a bill that would allow the parties to hit the public up for millions more to fund their expenses.

Perhaps Michael Bliss is right, and the Radwanski affair is about more than merely one man's ethical failings, but rather is an indictment of the whole "morally corrupt" system of patronage on which he fed, a corruption born of decades of Liberal machine politics that runs throughout the government, infecting politicians and bureaucrats alike. Or perhaps Prof. Bliss is being too kind.

For just as Mr. Radwanski's behaviour must be seen in the context of the vast industry that exists in Ottawa for the sole purpose of abusing the public purse, so the habits of the political class as a whole emerge from a culture that is everywhere prevalent, in the private sector as much as the public. Whether we corrupted them or they corrupted us, the fact is that we are all implicated, the whole country, so far as all of us have come to think ourselves entitled, as a right of citizenship, to spend other people's money.

Mr. Radwanski was a little too eager to indulge a taste for expensive cuisine and other personal pleasures at public expense?

Every day, executives of private corporations sit down to lunch in pricey restaurants, or catch a ball game from the comfort of a luxury skybox. They charge it to the company, and the company writes it off -- part of it -- on its taxes. At one point the "business entertainment" tax deduction covered as much as 80% of the cost of these little excursions, substantially reducing the company's expenses. Who picks up the rest of the tab? You and I, friend.

There's no objective reason for any of this. Business meetings can and do take place outside of four-star bistros. And whether or not any business was transacted, lunch would still be eaten. The only reason anyone connects the two is because they get a tax break -- a subsidy, in other words -- for doing so. Any government that formally proposed a program to subsidize the lunches of chief executives would be laughed out of office. But because it's done through the tax code, no one thinks twice about it.

Every time someone takes a tax deduction for a charitable or political donation, he is essentially doing the same thing. His purposes may be nobler -- or not -- but it still amounts to spending other people's money. The chief executive who swans about showering gifts on worthy causes like some sort of latter-day Lorenzo is in fact spending other people's money twice: once on behalf of his shareholders, a second time in lieu of the taxpayers.

But he's the one that gets to go to the fancy dress ball.

Still, these are statutory programs of general availability. Much worse is the practice, in which large sections of Canadian society have become expert, of wheedling special favours out of government. The first task of any senior executive in many Canadian industries, from banking to telecommunications to automobiles, is to suck up to those in high office. It is the skill for which they are hired, the yardstick by which they are judged.

And so on down. Those "angry" farmers or "enraged" fishermen on the evening news are exhibiting less genuine emotion than practised stagecraft. They do it not because they are unable to contain themselves but because they have long ago learned it brings results.

Whether these are proper uses of public funds is not the issue here.

It is the sense of entitlement, the notion that we have a right to reach into our neighbour's pocket, with no justification other than because we want to.

Not everyone is equally culpable. This week the last of the descendants of the great right-wing rabble-rouser Alberta Report ceased publication. It probably deserved to -- it was not the magazine it was -- but to its lasting credit it had refused to accept a federal grant, even when one was offered. Across the ideological divide, the editor of This Magazine snickered: "their ideology was incompatible with the reality of Canadian magazine publishing." She herself had had no difficulty in taking public money, with the result that "at this point, our magazine is growing and The Report is no more." But that's the point, isn't it? Bad money drives out good. Those who don't take the public teat go out of business. Those that remain live on forever.