[white_devil]

Every government is corrupt, because the very arrangement of government itself leads to corruption.

In Sweden's case, it's just not your average third-world style corruption like "hand me a bag of money and let's see about that building permit" - it's more about various "constituents" trading in favours/influence/power/positions/money.

Of course, the same kind of corruption applies to the US too. For example, campaign contributions are bribes already.

[okamiueru]

Flawed argument based on generalization.

The sentence itself reveals the fallacy: "leads to corruption", suggesting at some point it is not corrupt -- contradicted by "every government is corrupt". Q.E.D.

[white_devil]

Somehow there's always someone complaining about a "generalization", isn't there?

Here's what I said:

>> Every government is corrupt, because the very arrangement of government itself leads to corruption.

In this statement, "every government is corrupt" is a description of the state of affairs that the arrangement of government leads to. This does not contradict the idea of a government possibly not being corrupt at its inception - the point was that a government is a flawed institution right from the start.

Bear in mind, a government is a group of people that:

- Wields power over millions of people, and decides everything for them, even though their one-size-fits-all -solutions are practically guaranteed to not fit all.

- Forcefully extracts money from millions of people, and then uses it as they see fit.

- Is not responsible for their actions to anyone. In other words, no matter what they do, they won't suffer any negative consequences. Sure, someone may not get re-elected, but that doesn't really matter, and they'll still enjoy a fat pension (of other people's money) and so on.