[zdragnar]

That is an incredibly easy way to waste money.

Political donor: Hey Mr. Politician, I am going to buy some massive apartment complexes. Do me a favor and put a road through them, would you?

Politician: Sure thing, there's an election coming up and I do so love helping out our citizens! holds out hand to receive wads of donations

[p20z]

The current model enables the same behavior and makes it harder to track. Stalled projects have ongoing costs that make the project developers real money in exchange for no real effort. The same donor simply says “hey mr politician, give my company the exclusive contract and never mind that my aunt owns a building in our way. I’ll only charge you 30% for each year we are stalled.”

We burn money on these projects either way. A good windfall to property owners gives regular families a chance at enjoying some profits… and makes donors who block progress just a little easier to track!

[technobabbler]

This is in fact how many projects get built today, even without eminent domain.

[zdragnar]

If graft is a problem, the answer should not be "make graft easier and more common"

[technobabbler]

Graft is just one problem out of many though. Lack of public investment in public institutions, I'd argue, is another, bigger problem.

I'd like to see graft tackled by more competitive elections (multi-party, ranked-choice, easier voting processes, etc.) rather than simply gutting the government so it can't do anything at all... I think the conservatives call that starving the beast? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

That just puts government in a death spiral and drags huge swaths of society down with it.

By comparison, a small degree of graft is an inefficiency inherent in any large organization. As a taxpayer or customer, it doesn't necessarily matter to me whether $20 of my $100 goes to a politician's vacation home or the CEO's yacht, as long as the shit gets built effectively. If it gets to $50 or $80 of that $100 though... yeah, shit's broken.