One Man's Flimflammery is another Man's Crime

Bill Gates on-stage in CA has this to say about Government accounting practices:

The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said state budgets have received a puzzling lack of scrutiny and have been "riddled with gimmicks" aimed at deferring or disguising the true costs of public employees' health care and pension obligations, citing California's ongoing budget crisis as an example of creative deficit spending and the subsequent cuts to education spending as an unacceptable cost.

"[R]eally, when you get down to it, the guys at Enron never would have done this. This is so blatant, so extreme," Gates said of state governments' accounting practices generally. "Is anyone paying attention to some of the things these guys do? They borrow money -- they're not supposed to, but they figure out a way -- they make you pay more in withholding to help their cashflow out, they sell off the assets, they defer the payments, they sell off the revenues from tobacco."

Gates argued that government accounting practices should be more like private accounting.

The Enron line of course is splashy and makes the headline at the Huffington Post. I wonder though if that assessment is wholly accurate; they wouldn't because they were more upstanding guys who understood how wrong it was or they wouldn't because they knew it was a one-way ticket to pound-me-in-the...well, you know...prison.

Government accounting rules, by necessity, are different than what us little guys here in the real world have to live with. Acknowledging for a moment that this is 100% necessary and true, I'm still left to wonder how this is okay. What does it say of a government that allows itself the luxury of what it willingly imprisons it's citizens for?