| > Honest question: What would lead you to this conclusion? A person's incentive to pay attention to something is proportional to their ability to do something about it. If you have an organization meant to represent hundreds of millions of people, each individual has effectively ~zero control over it, and so pays little attention. Meanwhile, the larger the organization it is, the more resources it can extract from its base, the larger it can become. With size comes complexity. Complexity means there are more things for people to pay attention to. In combination the little attention people pay is spread thin over a large number of things. This makes corruption unlikely to be noticed and punished, which attracts corrupt people. > Moreover, you seem to have made the assumption that factoring corruption out of government at a structural level is impossible. If that's the case, I think you're being unimaginative. Which existing large government is free of corruption? Note that states with lower corruption scores like Denmark and Singapore are less than 5% of the size of the United States and have less corruption, not none. |