[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.