[seventytwo]

Corruption can’t be decoupled from any human organizational system, though. The system needs to be designed in a way to take corruption into account and minimize it.

In unregulated capitalism, corruption provides a huge competitive advantage, so controls must be put in place to counteract that. Typically that’s done with government intervention.

The idea that we can “blame cronyism, not capitalism”, is a red herring. Cronyism and corruption is something capitalism, as a system, must be able to deal with, or else capitalism is a poor system.

It’s like saying “don’t blame the engine, blame friction forces” for why an engine has poor qualities. Friction is a given and will always exist, it’s the poor engineering design of the engine that’s the problem. The design didn’t mitigate the friction appropriately.

[pibechorro]

Unregulated free trade doesnt reward corruption, it's the opposite. It rewards value to the consumer. Goverment intervention is what rewards corruption when it eventually becomes captured and now insiders control the levers of the economy forcing themselves on the end user. You need to invert your thinking, we need more freedom and less interventions by middle management. Market feedback needs to be emergent from the bottom up.

[seventytwo]

I’d argue that absent any regulations, there’s no such thing as corruption, just like without laws, nothing is criminal!

But is that the world we want?

The fact of the matter is that corruption, like crime, will always exist, so the system within which the corruption exists better be able to handle it, or it’s a poor system.

The author’s argument is basically the opposite - “the system is fine, it’s the pesky non-idealities that are the problem!”

My point is that this is a totally useless take. It’s like trying to build a rocket and wondering why it collapses on the launchpad because you hand waved away all the non-idealities: “oh, the rocket design was fine, it was those pesky non-idealities that we’re the problem!”