1. Mass media is owned by wealthy people, who do not want other people to question how they amassed that wealth, so corruption is not a widely discuted problem. As long as it doesn't touch everyone personally, it will stay this way.
2. Changing it requires organising. That "organising" is typically called government. It's pretty hard to install a whole new government. Reinstalling government in too slow manner will just reinfect newly elected officials with corruption and won't rid of the disease.
3. After changing government, there are still many wealthy people who will try to corrupt new government. Preventing that requires whole new system of governance, but it is not invented yet.
4. Hard to find THE perpetrators. Too many officials and too many corrupters, which do not make big universally regarded as bad moves. They corrupt little-by-little aka boiling the frog. Many wealthy people and officials are not actually corrupted, we just don't know which are.
I would add that for many people that try to change the Government from within end up becoming what they start out fighting against just to be in the process.
Here is what happens: people with appetites (easily blackmail-able) are promoted from early on and given access to resources like campaign funds and seats at the table. Morally strong people are shunned and elbowed out, or seduced.
Then it becomes a game of "Well, play ball and keep getting the gravy, or don't and we show and tell."
This is why we have the Denny Hasterts of the world: empty-suit nobodies who come out of nowhere to become speaker of the house, then are disappeared in a puff of hushed-up scandal when they are no longer useful or can't keep a lid on their appetites.
It's ridiculous that this isn't discussed in the education system. Even if it isn't intentional (it is) at some level stupidity becomes indistinguishable from malice.
I used to hear this but not believe that people would be groomed so brazenly. Then I saw it happen before my own eye in several global organizations (not government), now I believe, as you do, that this is one of the greatest sources of corruption: the corrupt work hard to raise people behind them who are just as corrupt, if not worse, because they can be controlled.
I used to know a couple former state senators who played key roles in getting a prominent state senator of the opposite party convicted for corruption. They immediately lost support of their own party and were voted out. One of them was badly frightened in the process and dropped out of the public eye entirely.
They had a lot to say about the workings of our legislature, including that the conflict between parties was largely a sham, and that if you wanted to stay in office, you participated in the quiet deals by which they all divided up the spoils.
Yeah, I call "system of governance" the entirety of rules that are enforced between people. Just people without serious system of governance are called "a mob". People are the hardware for governance, but like computer without operating system, people without governance system don't do much besides being there.
The answer is to limit the concentration of power. That is the Libertarian argument, if there is no lever to pull, there wont be corruption issues with people fighting over that lever. Instead, order should arise naturally as an emergent system from the ground up, always voluntarily with mutual benefit and never under the threat of force. A small corrupt goverment is always better than a massive corrupt goverment, and all systems of control eventually corrupt.
In France there is a lot of corrupted mayors, even in small villages/cities, it's hard to limit make the power less concentrated, you need accountability and making harder to be corrupted without being caught immediatly.
Limiting the opportunities for corruption is definitely important. The libertarian approach goes at it from another angle: limiting the damage that corrupt politicians can do, by limiting their authority over the rest of us. Seems to me that both approaches can work in tandem.
I’ve always felt that this perspective entirely ignores that government is not the only source of extant power and that “order should arise naturally as an emergent system from the ground up always voluntarily with mutual benefit” is woefully idealistic (and functionally impossible) as we are not operating from a clean slate. There are already powerful people/entities that will take immediate advantage of governmental reduction in power to increase their own without any consideration of consent and/or mutual benefit.
As an idea, sure - it’s lovely; but, if enacted, I don’t see how it doesn’t lead to something akin to feudalism. I’d even go so far as to suggest that it has the feeling of an ideological strategy by the already powerful to get the average person to ‘unilaterally disarm’ their own collective power. I’d love to be proved wrong, of course.
I think you have some valid points however you also have one massive bias running through your statement: That the route of all corruption is wealthy people. I see you have found your scape goat to the problem.
Wealthy people are just people - and there are many people who are not wealthy who are incredibly corrupt and more willing to take on the corruption risk. However it's much more convenient to paint wealthy people as the problem with the system then ascribe the problem to human nature as a whole or systemic problem.
Maybe, corruption by peasants doesn't have that much impact compared to corruption en masse via wealthy people in the place where he lives? However, I do acknowledge that corruption is not just caused by wealthy people. The place where I live people have to do corruption if they want to live average quality life because the salary is so low. With the current salary, if they work honestly, they can't even afford a house for 15 years.
You're conflating the people who commit the corrupt acts with the people who pay for the corrupt acts. Corrupt acts typically require some sort of payment, enough payment that it's worth the risk, so it would need to be significant relative to the salary. The poorer you are, the cheaper it is to get you to do a corrupt act. The wealthier you are in comparison, the cheaper it is (relative) to get someone to do a corrupt act.
But to your point, it takes two to tango, the person paying for the corruption and the person carrying out the corruption. I think the OP's point is the wealthy are the ones paying for it and asking for the deeds to be done.
Having said that, there are other types of corruption like CYA coverups we see in the news from police departments and justice systems. The Breonna Taylor grand jury result comes to mind.
> Maybe, corruption by peasants doesn't have that much impact compared to corruption en masse via wealthy people in the place where he lives?
Exactly yes. "Peasant's" just don't have enough money to meaningfully bribe someone.
> With the current salary, if they work honestly, they can't even afford a house for 15 years.
Wow, that seems like a nice place to live. I built a house (started in 2019, finished this year) with credit for 30 years, but I earn about twice the average in my country. Building it was the cheaper option, it was projected to be worth 50% more after building, now it's worth twice more.
Might I suggest that rigging an economy so that honest people cannot prosper from work does excuse corruption, but that the underlying policy is intended to make everyone complicit in massive corruption at the highest level?
Wealthy people are not corrupted, they are doing the corruption. As I said in other comment, not every wealthy man is a source of corruption. But poor people are not a source of corruption, because they don't have resources to corrupt officials. And poor officials are typically easier to corrupt. Again, probably way less than half of officials are corrupt.
> However it's much more convenient to paint wealthy people as the problem with the system then ascribe the problem to human nature as a whole or systemic problem.
Poor people don't have means to corrupt others, that's why corruption is typically coming from wealthy people.
Lets look at getting a driver's license in Brazil. It's widely known you can pay to pass your test, and driving instructors near ubiquitously act as middlemen. I know many people who have admitted to paying. They are not rich.
There are many stories I've heard over the years of minor corruptions like this. Paying off cops to ignore irregular documentation, paying off an official to get ahead in line ... this is absolutely beyond rich vs poor.
> But poor people are not a source of corruption, because they don't have resources to corrupt officials
Any policeman in a third-world country taking a random 10 dollars equivalent on the street from a random street vendor would disagree. Just because that kind of corruption hardly is world-changing does not mean it doesn't happen - I'd even wager that most global corruption is small-scale, low-amount by relatively poor people towards relatively low-ranking officials.
Agree - and from statistics we know the long-end of the distribution tail (i.e. smaller impacts) in aggregate can have power. To be clear I am not disputing wealthy people can be corrupt I'm saying that it's widespread amongst humanity and not one group of individuals.
Good argument. I think such bottom-level corruption is caused by top-level corruption and general demoralisation of society. When you have low-level worker who is corrupted, but higher-levels are moral, you can just denounce that one worker. If higher levels are also corrupt, you have no one to appeal to, so corruption thrives. So, fixing corruption from top should be first, but then low-level corruption should be stamped out as soon as possible.
Sorry I completely disagree with your view. It doesn't stack against how I've seen the world work.
I think you are talking in very broad brushes with terms like wealthy and poor people. I will say that across the distribution of wealth corruption happens at all levels. I am not disagreeing that some wealthy people are corrupt but your notion that they are the only corrupt people is ridiculous.
It's more about power. Wealthy people have more power and their corruption causes more widespread effects. Plus, uncorrupted officials don't support corrupted subordinates, so high-level corruption breeds more low-level corruption, or as they say "The fish spoils from the head".
But corruption itself if used to become wealthy. Such a rich person will be corrupted and corrupt furthermore.
Positions of power will attract people who are willing to be corrupted. Is a very important motivator for politicians.
Being rich is the end result, not the starting point. The starting point is a poor society but with valuable points of power which are not privately owned.
Again it's not about wealth, it's about people and power. Wealth has power attributes to it and is many cases a proxy to power.
However many government officials have incredible amounts of power but little wealth. Look at any communist party officials over the history of time you will see incredibly levels of corruptions without any wealth AND they aren't doing corrupt work for other people, they are doing it for their own benefit (To refute your idea that some wealthy person is behind their corruption).
If "corrupt" means "willing to cheat", then obviously that is not limited to the rich. If "corrupt" means "willing to abuse power bestowed on them by society", then it is literally impossible for the poor and disenfranchised, whom society has given nothing, to be corrupt, because they cannot abuse what they do not have.
People of all social classes participate in corruption, and have to do so, to survive. It is only those who have power who can be said to be abusing power, and when we talk about corruption, we're generally talking not about all bad human behaviors, but more specifically about the corrosion of institutions and social trust that occurs when those in charge use their positions toward unjust ends.
Is corruption not the undue influence of personal financial gain over political decisions?
Wealth is extremely important to the conversation, because corruption comes from individuals and corporations leveraging their wealth to influence politics outside of the democratic process.
We can try to design systems that prevent people who want to throw money at politicians from getting their way, but they will still be trying to do so.
Yes it’s systemic. Wealthy people aren’t mustache-twirling evil for wanting to leverage their wealth. They are making the most logical decision from their position.
But if the system continues concentrating more wealth among a smaller subset of the population, without putting up increasing safeguards against its influence, then corruption over democracy seems to be the natural systemic outcome.
Bad take. Although there are decent wealthy people, the proportions are different. The correlation between material success and human decency is negative and this needs to be known; indeed, one of the most important cultural battles in this war with Capital is to correct the biases many people hold that enable them to believe their ruling class is somehow "different". It's not.
Saying that there are some non-wealthy people who are also horrible, something we already know, is classic what-aboutism.
People who thrive in managerial hierarchies (private sector bureaucracies) tend not to be the best among us. Rather, they tend to be the cancer cells of the human species. They are individually fit at the expense of the organism, and while we might hope for a future in which the matter is different, right now the best tools we have to deal with them (e.g., chemotherapy, radiation) are blunt, destructive, and unfortunately quite brutal.
Incidentally, both chemotherapy machines and radiation machines are made by corporations. Corporations which are built and run by managers and executives which you could say "thrive in managerial hierarchies".
The value they add to our society and lives is tremendous and calling them "cancer" only shows your bias and lack of rationality.
I hope someone is paying you handsomely to post pro-corporate cappie nonsense here, because if you're doing it for free, that's just sad.
For a serious response to what you said about modern medicine and the role of corporations in it... technological growth is possible under socialist as well as capitalist systems. It wasn't clear until the 1980s who was ahead and, on that, the reason the US "won" the Cold War (although we really didn't; we just lost less) is not that capitalism is superior--to be clear, the USSR was also deeply flawed, and Stalin was a paranoid butcher for whose actions there is no excuse--but that capitalism was a sea empire and the USSR was a land empire, and modern conflict is unfavorable to land empires. That's it.
Land empires have to integrate people. Sea empires can point their cannons and say, "Give me money or die." The USSR had to integrate hundreds of different ethnicities. Capitalism just had to overthrow a few democratically-elected socialists and install dictators (see: Salvador and Allende). Capitalism was playing on easy mode; the USSR was playing on hard mode, and eventually fell after a severe mistake (Afghanistan) led to extreme internal dissent and resurgent nationalism.
Had it been the other way around--a capitalist land empire against a socialist sea empire--it would have been the socialists who were wealthy enough to build modern medicine.
How is what you are spouting off about communism vs capitalism related to my comment "everyone answers to someone". That comment works for capitalism, socialism, communism ... every system.
Your take is a really bad take riddled with falsisms and deeply concerning thoughts.
>>"The correlation between material success and human decency is negative and this needs to be known"
- Again this a myth that permeates society since the beginning days and sounds like you are targeting a population.
>>"one of the most important cultural battles in this war with Capital"
- War with the capital? Nobody is at war with the capital except the fringe right who have already shown their inability to understand the complexity of US institutions and how the world works except through violence to serve their own needs.
>>"People who thrive in managerial hierarchies (private sector bureaucracies) tend not to be the best among us. Rather, they tend to be the cancer cells of the human species."
- I am seriously concerned about your well-being.
It sounds like you are trying to make a call to violence based on some incredibly fringe thoughts.
> >>"one of the most important cultural battles in this war with Capital" - War with the capital? Nobody is at war with the capital except the fringe right who have already shown their inability to understand the complexity of US institutions and how the world works except through violence to serve their own needs.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you said, but it sounds like you interpreted "Capital" in their sentence as "the government" (or maybe "capitol" as in the building?). I'm pretty sure they meant capital as in "capitalism".
Could be - then I would take back my comment about war with Capital. However it makes the individuals comments less clear. Who is at war with Capital i.e. factories, mines, and railroads ?!?
"____ people are just people" is one of those thought-terminating things in this situation. It is true, but the degree to which it is useful depends highly on context.
Truly powerfully wealthy people are a small group, globally. They are just people in the sense that they eat and shit and love their moms like everyone else, yes.
But in their ability to shape the world around them they have much more capacity than almost everyone else. That is the topic here, and in that sense they are not "just normal people."
Saying that rich people are the problem is not saying that all rich people are a problem. They're very different assertions.
It's saying that people being rich is the problem. Having a desirable fungible thing means the ability to trade that desirable thing for favors. Being able to accumulate more of that thing means an unfair ability to do that. And that's corruption.
This comment focuses heavily on wealthy people. There is also the potential for "normal" people in that new government to be corrupted by power or the chance to make extra money.
At least in my experience, the local level politicians are more likely to be corrupt. Like city planners, district attorneys, etc. Their pay is lower so they are more likely to look for ways to make extra money. Or they might be doing improper things not for money, but for ideology/power (ie they might have joined despite the lower pay to make a difference, but they think they are doing the right thing even if breaking the rules). Like magistrates ignoring the law to rule against someone, or police and the DA holding a known incorrect charge against someone. Etc
Just wanted to point out that it's not all rich people, that many times it starts out as normal or poor people who want what they never had, and to never return to being poor. Although, those people may be more likely to bebecome rich since they're playing outside the system, not paying taxes, etc.
Where I live, the planners are widely considered to have been corrupt for decades. Planners are ordinary, medium-salary bureaucrats, dealing with hugely-valuable property and hugely-wealthy businessmen. Once the rot has set in, it seems to be really hard to remove it.
As long as we have automatic rulers (countries with automatically powerful government) corruption will be there. Basically corruption is profitable so that is why it happens. If we had democracy, it will go down significantly, because is is not profitable to corrupt the majority. You have to offer them more than the damage you will do to them with your actions, which is unprofitable, and maybe not corruption at that point since you made a deal with the “to be harmed” people, not their ruling minority.
For a lot of people, facing the facts about corruption - even if they’re not involved - is more emotionally painful than “ignore and pretend there’s no real problem”. The payoffs from fighting corruption are almost all large-scale and long-term, which are lesser priorities for most people. Fighting corruption is itself often expensive, in terms of political capital and limited trustworthy people to staff the effort. And those practicing it are usually very socially savvy, to make their activities feel “not so bad” now, vs. facing & stopping those difficult and painful.
What really floors me is that people can compartmentalise so well that they'll read an article like this, nod, agree and then argue at a dinner party that we should keep centralising more power into government bodies. There is no workable scheme to mix large government and honest government - and no shining examples that I'm aware of where it has ever succeeded. People can look at the system which throws out (in quick succession) Obama, Trump, Biden and seriously claim it should be the major system that controls:
1. ...healthcare
2. ...who gets a bank account, what money gets spent on
3. ...which countries to invade
4. ...a lot of other stuff
I respect the position because I have no choice but how an entity that schizophrenic, over-stretched with responsibilities and mad with power is supposed to resist corruption I do not see. It is going to be a moral and administrative cesspit.
Transparency+accountability seems to be best answer for corruption. If you can make deals for hidden reasons, you can hide from scrutiny. If you have transparency, you can start to apply accountability. Those making bad decisions should bear the consequences.
I mean, there are other counties that do have large government that controls these things and also less corruption. There are also smaller governments with even more corruption, such as any small town with one racist or self-dealing sheriff. So idk, corruption and governing body size doesn’t seem correlated to me.
I agree that it's not about small. I think it's about limited.
There have to be limits on the government's power, whether they come from the constitution, the country's legal system, or the traditional culture and character of the people.
I don't think it's even possible to have a small government presiding over a large thing. That thing might be a region, an economy, or really anything -- as soon as the thing gets too many resources, the government either grows or is replaced. If you try to keep government small, you don't end up removing power and corruption. You just move them to other entities. Those other entities may not use the word government, but the word is obviously not the problem.
It's easy enough to justify this by looking at the opposite end of the spectrum: are there any examples of small government that have succeeded other than by presiding over only very few resources? I'm having even more trouble thinking of any than thinking of examples of successful large government.
Corruption is using public trust for private gain. It's quite independent of centralization, and it happens in all organizations, not only government ones.
The countries seen as least corrupt by their citizens all have what you would call "large governments".
Those metrics probably tend to measure things like whether you have to pay unofficial bribes to officials as part of daily life. Picking on the US as an example of a low-corruption country, it is crystal clear that the major politicians are up to their neck in it. Bribery is all but the way politics works.
And the Americans have very transparent politics compared to the EU. I expect the situation there is a lot more civilised in how much they advertise what is really going on. Nobody has come up with the philosophical tools that are needed for a public to assess how corrupt the government is and respond to it.
The metric I referred to was perceptions of corruption. The US is 67th on that list. Americans have a really low impression of their representatives' fidelity, despite stuff like petty bribes being uncommon.
Replying a bit quickly so you might want to edit it but, you say 67th and that is a misread. The US is actually 27th/28th on the list. It ranks pretty well.
Particularly when the competition is somewhere like Denmark/Finland/New Zealand in slot one. I mean, sure. 6 million people is a mid-tier US state. There are probably some cracking good local councils out there too. The scale isn't impressive as far as 8 billion humans reckon it. If we want to break the world up into >1,000 countries with independent governments I'd consider that a step in the right direction for small government and cracking down on corruption.
Corruption in US politics is open and transparent; senators and congressmen can't get elected without campaign donations, and everyone knows that donations come with strings. It's hardly surprising if a senator from a hypothetical coal-mining state, who openly accepts donations from coal-mining interests, and who owns a mining company himself, blocks anti-carbon initiatives.
I think the point about America ignoring corruption is the most crucial aspect of corruption; the enablers, essentially laws, policy makers or systems that have unintented flaws (loopholes) or intended ones (legal bribery) is a huge part of why corruption succeed or even thrives.
On another note its also important to point out that culture also plays a role, certain well off cultures you have corruption in the form of lavish events or gifts or some cases where it's in the gray area (like say you rub my back I rub yours).
This may be true and it could actually be effective to do so, but whenever I see such viewpoints I can't help myself from noticing just how narrow they are.
All systems conceived by man so far are deeply flawed and libertarianism-like systems have some pretty horrendous blindspots, if you ask me.
You need cooperation at a society level in order to tackle many externalities and existential issues, and that requires people organically coming together (won't happen) or some overarching entity with some sort of stick and good intentions or maybe something else, just not sure what.
Corruption is a human tendency and will never not be a problem. Even with anti-corruption policies in place, without proactive measures to continually undermine corruption efforts, those policies attenuate across time. This is due to people figuring out how to circumvent the current rules of law or a degradation in integrity when following the the rule of law.
Once anti-corruption institutions put in-place to investigate and prosecute corruption themselves become corrupted, then the system will rapidly degrade to cover up the favored de facto political power corruption. Depending on the system in place, this can occur either top-down or bottom-up. In the US, it appears to be occurring top-down.
Political party loyalism always leads to corruption, which is why it's absolutely critical to have a multiple party system with strong de jure political powers to keep the de facto political power in-check. There are numerous historical accounts depicting what happens when you do not. In the US, both parties should be split up and serve as more representative components to their constituencies, and to keep each other in balance more so than what's transpiring today.
People practicing the earliest forms of democracy knew that party politics would lead to problems so they structured it using the only actually democratic process: sortition
Focusing on corruption is just bluntly stupid on many fronts. It’s a prestige from someone comes from a constitutional republic but lacks understanding of local context. It is extremely ignorant to claim corruptions shaped history when corruptions were always the symptom not the cause.
This superficial worldview caused horrible errors in American foreign policy decisions. The US gave up Chinese government during China’s civil war, so let the communists took over. Did the same thing in Vietnam. Similarly in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other places, given up the government and let terrorists took the country.
All because the corruptions in their governments. The fact is that those governments were deemed to be corrupted no matter who is in charge. You cannot just command them out of corruptions. So instead of living with the imperfect reality of the historical and cultural context, we choose to let the worst to take over so that we can close eyes and make nice postures.
Simple case of distributed costs and concentrated benefits. Imagine a corrupt bureaucrat who demands a small bribe from every person who needs them to perform a service. It's a pain, but the bribe is small and it's just this one bureaucrat this one time. The bureaucrat, of course, is doing this to everybody, so they amass a great sum even though every person pays a small amount. The bureaucrat can put a lot of effort into maintaining his corrupt position. But for the people who pay the bribes, it's not worth it to upend their own lives in a crusade against that one corrupt official over the matter of a small bribe.
Corruption is the "real full-market" society, where anything is on sale. That's why neoliberal world dislike to speak about it. Formal dictatorship on the other side do not like talking about it except to justify some move against opponents because corruptions as illegal thing means that their rules can be breached.
Morale and corruption are kind of opposite elements used to form a society, "self"-imposed gates between the direct personal interest and the society-wide interest as also a personal long-term interest.
Issues arise because most do not really "master the society they live in" so they can't know implications deeply enough to decide and other who master the society enough can abuse those who don't for their own sake.
My view is: culture shape the history, the more culture the more just society so the less corruption. The more corrupted society means less culture, less justice, something unstable that can made few rich an many poor BUT not only rich the skilled and poor the less skilled, in a far more unbalanced, casual and bad for evolution manner.
I lived in Korea prior to Chun's liberalization in the late 80's and the traffic police would ask for bribes instead of writing tickets. This money flowed up to the local chief of police, who became very wealthy, and across to politicians. Complaints were hushed up or ignored. People who complained too much and journalists who didn't play ball just disappeared. what changed this was the end of media censorship, which people knew was real because the guys you called to deal with media problems stopped answering their phones. Corruption in the US has gotten quite bad and there's still a long way to go.
The rumor was that liberalization was a condition for hosting the 88 Olympics. Media censorship ended, elections were held, and there were lots of demonstrations and turmoil.
Transparency is the solution. Really. If you are on the display, there would be no room to commit crime. Dash cams, body cams are all great examples, where trabsparency prevents power abuse.
I would suggest that if you‘d have to forever open all of your bank accounts and history whenever you assume a high ranking public service role - there would be only a little way for corruption „services“, as you cannot hoard non-monetary goods as much as you can hoard cash
There’s another kind of transparency that’s harmful. We have a face-recognition database that can conclude a particular woman was arrested for sex work. There might be some suggestion she was trafficked, and that conclusion comes from her activity trying to keep a low profile. Celebrities (who otherwise have no background in the side-effects) promote this technique and police departments in large, religiously conservative countries use it. I wonder if it harms more than it helps.
Yeah, we should not strive for transparency everywhere, but for those in power. More power = more possibilities for corruption = should be more accountable. Ability to do SOME level of against-law things should be upheld, because law itself is not perfect and doesn't predict every situation.
The author doesn't connect with one of the most harmful characteristics of corruption: the way it spreads, like rust, or dry rot.
If your boss is a crook, then he's not going to mind if you're crooked too. In fact he'd prefer it - he won't want goody two-shoes as his subordinate, and having the dirt on you will enable him to control you. And so on, down the stack of turtles. A clean policeman in a corrupt department, refusing to take the payola, runs the risk of getting no backup when he's in trouble.
Author notes that corruption in an army results in the hollowing-out of that army - equipment, men and supplies that are recorded on the books are fictional. But entire societies get hollowed-out; this is why corruption ought to be stomped on early and hard.
Unfortunately, a fish starts rotting at the head. Who's to do the stomping, if the chief is a crook?
Biggest thing I don’t see mentioned about this: the only people in a position to deal with individual cases corruption are themselves corrupt and only wish to do so in order to pursue their own political agenda. Anti-corruption is more often than not nothing more than an excuse to achieve some other goal.
Well, the article gets quite tricky with the Supreme Court decision that let McConnell off the hook. It does look like he did not commit the overt corrupt act at the definition of the statute, and the judge instructed the jury badly.
The article claims this is complicity in the Supreme Court, but I’m not so sure. Cases of corruption since that verdict have been interesting:
Because corruption is a characteristic of public ownership of resources. It happens when valuables are administrated by employed officials.
"Western" administrations keep corruption under control through education and culture. Non-western administrations have often included corruption in their culture.
Private property and free markets quickly root out any corruption.
Corruption definitely exists as people are periodically convicted for it, but outside of those convictions the majority of talk about it seems to be a cope for the failures of systems we create freely. This writer references a corruption conviction but then misrepresents its overturning by the supreme court as more corruption when the court unanimously just set a probably agreeable definition and allowed the case to be persued under this definition. Once you do any digging on most claims of corruption you find inconvenient constraints and facts that most people have no understanding of that take the righteousness out of the claims.
Corruption is overwhelmingly an easy scapegoat you can gesture towards and have people agree with you without much effort. If we think there's something that is corruption that isn't covered by the legal code we can agree on what that is and push for it in the legal system. If we think our executives aren't enforcing our legal code we are the ones who elect them. If the problem is that no one cares enough to make the "right" decisions then whining about elites isn't going to do anything.
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[ 33.5 ms ] story [ 2763 ms ] thread1. Mass media is owned by wealthy people, who do not want other people to question how they amassed that wealth, so corruption is not a widely discuted problem. As long as it doesn't touch everyone personally, it will stay this way.
2. Changing it requires organising. That "organising" is typically called government. It's pretty hard to install a whole new government. Reinstalling government in too slow manner will just reinfect newly elected officials with corruption and won't rid of the disease.
3. After changing government, there are still many wealthy people who will try to corrupt new government. Preventing that requires whole new system of governance, but it is not invented yet.
4. Hard to find THE perpetrators. Too many officials and too many corrupters, which do not make big universally regarded as bad moves. They corrupt little-by-little aka boiling the frog. Many wealthy people and officials are not actually corrupted, we just don't know which are.
Corruption is just too natural consequence of someone managing resources without being directly affected by outcomes.
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.
Then it becomes a game of "Well, play ball and keep getting the gravy, or don't and we show and tell."
This is why we have the Denny Hasterts of the world: empty-suit nobodies who come out of nowhere to become speaker of the house, then are disappeared in a puff of hushed-up scandal when they are no longer useful or can't keep a lid on their appetites.
It's ridiculous that this isn't discussed in the education system. Even if it isn't intentional (it is) at some level stupidity becomes indistinguishable from malice.
I used to know a couple former state senators who played key roles in getting a prominent state senator of the opposite party convicted for corruption. They immediately lost support of their own party and were voted out. One of them was badly frightened in the process and dropped out of the public eye entirely.
They had a lot to say about the workings of our legislature, including that the conflict between parties was largely a sham, and that if you wanted to stay in office, you participated in the quiet deals by which they all divided up the spoils.
The system has nothing to do with it. It is the people.
In France there is a lot of corrupted mayors, even in small villages/cities, it's hard to limit make the power less concentrated, you need accountability and making harder to be corrupted without being caught immediatly.
As an idea, sure - it’s lovely; but, if enacted, I don’t see how it doesn’t lead to something akin to feudalism. I’d even go so far as to suggest that it has the feeling of an ideological strategy by the already powerful to get the average person to ‘unilaterally disarm’ their own collective power. I’d love to be proved wrong, of course.
Wealthy people are just people - and there are many people who are not wealthy who are incredibly corrupt and more willing to take on the corruption risk. However it's much more convenient to paint wealthy people as the problem with the system then ascribe the problem to human nature as a whole or systemic problem.
But to your point, it takes two to tango, the person paying for the corruption and the person carrying out the corruption. I think the OP's point is the wealthy are the ones paying for it and asking for the deeds to be done.
Having said that, there are other types of corruption like CYA coverups we see in the news from police departments and justice systems. The Breonna Taylor grand jury result comes to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor
Exactly yes. "Peasant's" just don't have enough money to meaningfully bribe someone.
> With the current salary, if they work honestly, they can't even afford a house for 15 years.
Wow, that seems like a nice place to live. I built a house (started in 2019, finished this year) with credit for 30 years, but I earn about twice the average in my country. Building it was the cheaper option, it was projected to be worth 50% more after building, now it's worth twice more.
> However it's much more convenient to paint wealthy people as the problem with the system then ascribe the problem to human nature as a whole or systemic problem.
Poor people don't have means to corrupt others, that's why corruption is typically coming from wealthy people.
Lets look at getting a driver's license in Brazil. It's widely known you can pay to pass your test, and driving instructors near ubiquitously act as middlemen. I know many people who have admitted to paying. They are not rich.
There are many stories I've heard over the years of minor corruptions like this. Paying off cops to ignore irregular documentation, paying off an official to get ahead in line ... this is absolutely beyond rich vs poor.
How can you hold responsible people who have no economic freedom?
Any policeman in a third-world country taking a random 10 dollars equivalent on the street from a random street vendor would disagree. Just because that kind of corruption hardly is world-changing does not mean it doesn't happen - I'd even wager that most global corruption is small-scale, low-amount by relatively poor people towards relatively low-ranking officials.
I think you are talking in very broad brushes with terms like wealthy and poor people. I will say that across the distribution of wealth corruption happens at all levels. I am not disagreeing that some wealthy people are corrupt but your notion that they are the only corrupt people is ridiculous.
Positions of power will attract people who are willing to be corrupted. Is a very important motivator for politicians.
Being rich is the end result, not the starting point. The starting point is a poor society but with valuable points of power which are not privately owned.
However many government officials have incredible amounts of power but little wealth. Look at any communist party officials over the history of time you will see incredibly levels of corruptions without any wealth AND they aren't doing corrupt work for other people, they are doing it for their own benefit (To refute your idea that some wealthy person is behind their corruption).
If "corrupt" means "willing to cheat", then obviously that is not limited to the rich. If "corrupt" means "willing to abuse power bestowed on them by society", then it is literally impossible for the poor and disenfranchised, whom society has given nothing, to be corrupt, because they cannot abuse what they do not have.
People of all social classes participate in corruption, and have to do so, to survive. It is only those who have power who can be said to be abusing power, and when we talk about corruption, we're generally talking not about all bad human behaviors, but more specifically about the corrosion of institutions and social trust that occurs when those in charge use their positions toward unjust ends.
Since when it doesn't?!
> If "corrupt" means "willing to abuse power bestowed on them by society"
You've just described any public administration: not rich (working on it thought) but corrupted to the bone.
Wealth is extremely important to the conversation, because corruption comes from individuals and corporations leveraging their wealth to influence politics outside of the democratic process.
We can try to design systems that prevent people who want to throw money at politicians from getting their way, but they will still be trying to do so.
Yes it’s systemic. Wealthy people aren’t mustache-twirling evil for wanting to leverage their wealth. They are making the most logical decision from their position.
But if the system continues concentrating more wealth among a smaller subset of the population, without putting up increasing safeguards against its influence, then corruption over democracy seems to be the natural systemic outcome.
Saying that there are some non-wealthy people who are also horrible, something we already know, is classic what-aboutism.
People who thrive in managerial hierarchies (private sector bureaucracies) tend not to be the best among us. Rather, they tend to be the cancer cells of the human species. They are individually fit at the expense of the organism, and while we might hope for a future in which the matter is different, right now the best tools we have to deal with them (e.g., chemotherapy, radiation) are blunt, destructive, and unfortunately quite brutal.
The value they add to our society and lives is tremendous and calling them "cancer" only shows your bias and lack of rationality.
--Your boss
I hope someone is paying you handsomely to post pro-corporate cappie nonsense here, because if you're doing it for free, that's just sad.
For a serious response to what you said about modern medicine and the role of corporations in it... technological growth is possible under socialist as well as capitalist systems. It wasn't clear until the 1980s who was ahead and, on that, the reason the US "won" the Cold War (although we really didn't; we just lost less) is not that capitalism is superior--to be clear, the USSR was also deeply flawed, and Stalin was a paranoid butcher for whose actions there is no excuse--but that capitalism was a sea empire and the USSR was a land empire, and modern conflict is unfavorable to land empires. That's it.
Land empires have to integrate people. Sea empires can point their cannons and say, "Give me money or die." The USSR had to integrate hundreds of different ethnicities. Capitalism just had to overthrow a few democratically-elected socialists and install dictators (see: Salvador and Allende). Capitalism was playing on easy mode; the USSR was playing on hard mode, and eventually fell after a severe mistake (Afghanistan) led to extreme internal dissent and resurgent nationalism.
Had it been the other way around--a capitalist land empire against a socialist sea empire--it would have been the socialists who were wealthy enough to build modern medicine.
>>"The correlation between material success and human decency is negative and this needs to be known" - Again this a myth that permeates society since the beginning days and sounds like you are targeting a population.
>>"one of the most important cultural battles in this war with Capital" - War with the capital? Nobody is at war with the capital except the fringe right who have already shown their inability to understand the complexity of US institutions and how the world works except through violence to serve their own needs.
>>"People who thrive in managerial hierarchies (private sector bureaucracies) tend not to be the best among us. Rather, they tend to be the cancer cells of the human species." - I am seriously concerned about your well-being.
It sounds like you are trying to make a call to violence based on some incredibly fringe thoughts.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you said, but it sounds like you interpreted "Capital" in their sentence as "the government" (or maybe "capitol" as in the building?). I'm pretty sure they meant capital as in "capitalism".
Truly powerfully wealthy people are a small group, globally. They are just people in the sense that they eat and shit and love their moms like everyone else, yes.
But in their ability to shape the world around them they have much more capacity than almost everyone else. That is the topic here, and in that sense they are not "just normal people."
It's saying that people being rich is the problem. Having a desirable fungible thing means the ability to trade that desirable thing for favors. Being able to accumulate more of that thing means an unfair ability to do that. And that's corruption.
People see that rich people are getting ahead by corruption, so they emulate them and that is their rationale for breaking the rules.
At least in my experience, the local level politicians are more likely to be corrupt. Like city planners, district attorneys, etc. Their pay is lower so they are more likely to look for ways to make extra money. Or they might be doing improper things not for money, but for ideology/power (ie they might have joined despite the lower pay to make a difference, but they think they are doing the right thing even if breaking the rules). Like magistrates ignoring the law to rule against someone, or police and the DA holding a known incorrect charge against someone. Etc
Just wanted to point out that it's not all rich people, that many times it starts out as normal or poor people who want what they never had, and to never return to being poor. Although, those people may be more likely to bebecome rich since they're playing outside the system, not paying taxes, etc.
Where I live, the planners are widely considered to have been corrupt for decades. Planners are ordinary, medium-salary bureaucrats, dealing with hugely-valuable property and hugely-wealthy businessmen. Once the rot has set in, it seems to be really hard to remove it.
1. ...healthcare
2. ...who gets a bank account, what money gets spent on
3. ...which countries to invade
4. ...a lot of other stuff
I respect the position because I have no choice but how an entity that schizophrenic, over-stretched with responsibilities and mad with power is supposed to resist corruption I do not see. It is going to be a moral and administrative cesspit.
The problem is that "we simply need to make the government good" is not realistic. That's the single biggest reason people want limited government.
There have to be limits on the government's power, whether they come from the constitution, the country's legal system, or the traditional culture and character of the people.
It's easy enough to justify this by looking at the opposite end of the spectrum: are there any examples of small government that have succeeded other than by presiding over only very few resources? I'm having even more trouble thinking of any than thinking of examples of successful large government.
This notion is not lost on those who are arguing the Federal government should be smaller.
The countries seen as least corrupt by their citizens all have what you would call "large governments".
And the Americans have very transparent politics compared to the EU. I expect the situation there is a lot more civilised in how much they advertise what is really going on. Nobody has come up with the philosophical tools that are needed for a public to assess how corrupt the government is and respond to it.
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021
Particularly when the competition is somewhere like Denmark/Finland/New Zealand in slot one. I mean, sure. 6 million people is a mid-tier US state. There are probably some cracking good local councils out there too. The scale isn't impressive as far as 8 billion humans reckon it. If we want to break the world up into >1,000 countries with independent governments I'd consider that a step in the right direction for small government and cracking down on corruption.
The government is the one hierarchy so far that we have figured how to democratize.
Corporations are also corrupt and are always autocratic.
On another note its also important to point out that culture also plays a role, certain well off cultures you have corruption in the form of lavish events or gifts or some cases where it's in the gray area (like say you rub my back I rub yours).
All systems conceived by man so far are deeply flawed and libertarianism-like systems have some pretty horrendous blindspots, if you ask me.
You need cooperation at a society level in order to tackle many externalities and existential issues, and that requires people organically coming together (won't happen) or some overarching entity with some sort of stick and good intentions or maybe something else, just not sure what.
Once anti-corruption institutions put in-place to investigate and prosecute corruption themselves become corrupted, then the system will rapidly degrade to cover up the favored de facto political power corruption. Depending on the system in place, this can occur either top-down or bottom-up. In the US, it appears to be occurring top-down.
Political party loyalism always leads to corruption, which is why it's absolutely critical to have a multiple party system with strong de jure political powers to keep the de facto political power in-check. There are numerous historical accounts depicting what happens when you do not. In the US, both parties should be split up and serve as more representative components to their constituencies, and to keep each other in balance more so than what's transpiring today.
This superficial worldview caused horrible errors in American foreign policy decisions. The US gave up Chinese government during China’s civil war, so let the communists took over. Did the same thing in Vietnam. Similarly in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other places, given up the government and let terrorists took the country.
All because the corruptions in their governments. The fact is that those governments were deemed to be corrupted no matter who is in charge. You cannot just command them out of corruptions. So instead of living with the imperfect reality of the historical and cultural context, we choose to let the worst to take over so that we can close eyes and make nice postures.
Morale and corruption are kind of opposite elements used to form a society, "self"-imposed gates between the direct personal interest and the society-wide interest as also a personal long-term interest.
Issues arise because most do not really "master the society they live in" so they can't know implications deeply enough to decide and other who master the society enough can abuse those who don't for their own sake.
My view is: culture shape the history, the more culture the more just society so the less corruption. The more corrupted society means less culture, less justice, something unstable that can made few rich an many poor BUT not only rich the skilled and poor the less skilled, in a far more unbalanced, casual and bad for evolution manner.
On the contrary, it could be easily implemented on people not in power to prevent uprising.
If your boss is a crook, then he's not going to mind if you're crooked too. In fact he'd prefer it - he won't want goody two-shoes as his subordinate, and having the dirt on you will enable him to control you. And so on, down the stack of turtles. A clean policeman in a corrupt department, refusing to take the payola, runs the risk of getting no backup when he's in trouble.
Author notes that corruption in an army results in the hollowing-out of that army - equipment, men and supplies that are recorded on the books are fictional. But entire societies get hollowed-out; this is why corruption ought to be stomped on early and hard.
Unfortunately, a fish starts rotting at the head. Who's to do the stomping, if the chief is a crook?
The article claims this is complicity in the Supreme Court, but I’m not so sure. Cases of corruption since that verdict have been interesting:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4...
"Western" administrations keep corruption under control through education and culture. Non-western administrations have often included corruption in their culture.
Private property and free markets quickly root out any corruption.
Corruption is overwhelmingly an easy scapegoat you can gesture towards and have people agree with you without much effort. If we think there's something that is corruption that isn't covered by the legal code we can agree on what that is and push for it in the legal system. If we think our executives aren't enforcing our legal code we are the ones who elect them. If the problem is that no one cares enough to make the "right" decisions then whining about elites isn't going to do anything.