| It isn't about the person. It is about the scale of government. Running a small business is not the same as a large business. Ok, have you ever played civilization? In civilization corruption goes up as you build more cities and the farther those cities are from the capital. That is to reflect the reality of managing larger and larger groups of people. Solutions that can work on the state level don't necessarily work on the federal level. The Netherlands are basically the size of a state with an extremely homogeneous population, and a far less cut throat culture than the US. In small groups of 10-20 people communism works very well. It doesn't work in bigger groups though. The bigger the group the more perverse incentives are acted upon. Even beyond that though the US is a cut throat competitive culture. Eventually the person in charge of treasury will want to show that the democrats/republicans before them did a bad job of collecting tax revenue. They will realize by not offering deductions a lot of people will just pay and this will end up with them looking like they did a really good job. Or maybe it will be someone lower on the totem pole that wants to move up and can show that they did a better job at collecting tax revenue. Also, solutions that work in the US probably won't work in China or India because the population is so much larger that US solutions won't scale properly. |