[brokenmusic]

I'm always amazed at how people want to fight corruption not really understanding that corruption is inherent to politics and government. You can't fight it. It's like fighting aging with plastic surgery. Sure, it may look good on the surface and it may even make you feel good psychologically, for a while. But you're still aging. Best you can do is accept that and lead a healthy lifestyle.

So, if you try fight corruption, it simply becomes more obscure. Corruption exists purely because governments and institutions exist. If you didn't have those, you wouldn't need to bribe some third party in order to be able to establish a business relationship with someone else (e.g. get a licence, permit, etc).

[jim-greer]

> You can't fight it. It's like fighting aging with plastic surgery.

It's more like fighting crime. Aging is an irreversible process that happens to one person. Crime and corruption are background processes that happen to societies.

You can fight it. You can't eliminate it, of course.

Here's a good book on the subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/books/review/zephyr-teacho...

[brokenmusic]

Crime too. If you look at what are most of the crimes that are committed in any given country, it quickly becomes obvious that those are mostly victimless crimes or crimes that are invoked by governments declaring something to be illegal (while it harms no one): like drugs being illegal provokes a lot of violence, gang culture etc. The only true systematic source of evil in any country is its government. Without it, you'd still have bad things happening, but it won't be on the same level.

[jim-greer]

Uh, violent crime exists. And it's worth fighting. Right? As is corruption? Or do you think we should give up on both?

[brokenmusic]

What I'm saying is, governments foster violent crime by criminalizing many peaceful things. The best thing you can do to dramatically decrease violent crime rates is get rid of governments.

[afarrell]

You can't get rid of governments though. People would spontaneously form states either to protect themselves, or to take advantage of the opportunity to set up protection rackets and tax others.

[Retric]

I find it amusing how people who dislike governments rarely move to failed states. You can easily move to an area without regulation or taxes but there not actually places you want to be.

[lazyjones]

Amen.

My impression from a small european country is that most politicians will happily damage the tax payer for an amount roughly 2 orders of magnitude higher than the corresponding bribe, whether by taking a cut when privatizations happen or by spending ludicrous amounts on infrastructure projects or military hardware, or even by investing taxpayers' money badly on purpose to benefit banks (who pay bribes).

The only remedy I see is more transparency (all contracts, offers etc. must be made public) - but recent trends go in the other direction with secret agreements, more direct democracy (immediate direct public votes to prevent unpopular political decisions) and harsh punishment when officials are caught taking bribes (the Chinese go to extremes though - death penalty sometimes - with no apparent effect).

Long-term, very optimistic vision: replace corrupt political decision makers by AI, but I fear human tricksters will be able to take advantage of that too.

[lmm]

Fighting corruption is like putting a tax on it; it disincentivises it, makes it less efficient. If you allowed people to openly bribe politicians you would get much worse laws. Every bit of "obscurity" we force on them costs, makes corruption more expensive and less worthwhile.

[Istof]

a good start would be to stop legalized bribery...