Honor codes are a basic tool to encourage honest scholarship so that the "model ideas" that come out of academia can be trusted. If you let people simply lie, then our "best and brightest ideas" can represent the best liars, creating a culture of unchecked corruption. But by all means, given that they've decided that unchecked corruption is the best form of government (look at our national government, and that decision is clear), we might as well scrap any claim to honesty from top to bottom. Makes sense to me.