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Editor’s Note: With the U.S. presidential election coming up, corruption will be a
big topic in the news. The typical American thinks it’s the government's job to
stamp corruption out of society. Casey Research founder Doug Casey has a
much different take...
Louis James: Doug, one of the complaints Egyptians have of the rulers they are
showing to the door is corruption. It's the same in Tunisia. It seems that more
than the lack of freedom or even the secret police, it's government corruption that
bothers citizens the most. This fits with your concern that ousting the old bosses
will just lead to new bosses who will be every bit as bad; these people don't want
to get rid of their governments, they want those governments to work. And yet,
I've heard you speak of making corruption your friend. Can you tell us what you
mean by that?
Doug: Sure. As always, the place to start is with a definition. This is critical,
because people use terms like corruption in nebulous ways that enable sloppy
thinking. Unless you can define precisely what a word means, you literally can't
know what you're talking about. That's one reason why listening to commentators
like Hannity, Beck, and O'Reilly is such a frustrating waste of time. These people
are constantly conflating concepts, like the idea of America with the reality of the
U.S., or confusing capitalism with fascism, or war with defense, because precise
definitions often get in the way of emotive rhetoric.
B: Decay, decomposition.
C: Inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (bribery).
Doug: Yes, I looked it up too, and those definitions are accurate as far as they
go. But they don't get to the heart of corruption, its essence, and why people hate
it, even while it is often a necessary thing. A more meaningful definition (certainly
when it comes to political corruption) is, a betrayal of a trust for personal gain.
Doug: Sure. One can find corruption within corporations, as when directors
betray their duty to the shareholders for personal gain. Or churches, as when
priests, for pleasure, betray the trust of the young people under their guidance.
Even a parent can be corrupt, if he fritters away on high living money needed to
feed his kids. But those types of corruption stem from personal weakness and
personal vices. They're horrible…but corruption in government is much worse.
Only government can impose its will on you by law and back it up with a gun.
And with other sources of corruption you can (theoretically, at least) go to the
government for redress. But when the government is corrupt, it's hard to get the
state's right hand to cut off its left. Not only that, but government, partly because
its essence is force, concentrates corruption and incubates it. If a company or
church is corrupt, one can quit them. But most citizens are stuck with their
government, and they'll probably keep paying taxes to it regardless of their
feelings toward it. A discussion about corruption is necessarily a discussion
about government as an institution.
L: Because government officials have power that can make or break fortunes.
And that creates incentives among those on the receiving end of state power to
try to sway it to their advantage.
Doug: As Tacitus said in the second century A.D., "The more corrupt the state,
the more numerous the laws." It's absolutely predictable that as all these
governments around the world, and I mean all of them, respond to the ongoing
crisis with an ever-accelerating onslaught of new laws, there will be more and
more corruption, and frustration with that corruption.
Tacitus was right. But he could just as accurately have said, "The more
numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state," because lots of laws engender
lots of corruption. In other words, corruption isn't the problem. The state and its
laws are the problem, to which corruption is an unsavory and unaesthetic, but
necessary, solution. Laws create corruption, and corruption engenders laws.
Every time a legislature convenes, they pass more and more laws. That's all they
do, all day long. So the body of laws and the accompanying volumes of
administrative regulations and procedures to implement them is constantly
growing the whole world over. Legislatures are horrible and dangerous things
that bring out the absolute worst in the people who inhabit them.
Laws and regulations are like barnacles on a ship. They keep growing and
growing, weighing the ship down, slowing it down. If they aren't scraped off from
time to time, they will threaten the ship's structural integrity.
L: Tacitus also said: "The desire for safety stands against every great and noble
enterprise." No matter how many times I see it, it always astounds me how the
more things change, the more they remain the same. That's really just another
way to say that there is such a thing as human nature.
At any rate, the reason corruption results from the proliferation of laws may not
be clear to all our readers. Consider the Internet: it interprets censorship as
damage and automatically routes around it. The market interprets government
regulation as a hindrance and seeks ways around it. Private regulation, in
contrast, is a selling point, as when electronics have the UL (Underwriters
Laboratories) seal of approval. The proliferation of laws increases the incentive to
circumvent the law, and circumventing the law, in this context, is corruption.
Doug: My thoughts exactly. A law is passed because it seems like a good idea at
the time, at least for some groups of people who approve of it…anti-pornography
laws, for example. But it doesn't seem like a good idea to people who like
pornography, or even most normal people these days, who don't think human
sexuality is inherently evil. Meanwhile, the people whose preferred choices just
got made illegal aren't going to change their views because the government
passed a law. So they find ways to work around the law.
Doug: Stupid. In the literal sense of the word, meaning unwittingly self-
destructive. Those laws necessarily have the opposite effect of what's intended.
By raising the stakes, they just raise the level of bribery required, resulting in
even more severe corruption. Like everything governments do, it's not just the
wrong thing to do, but the exact opposite of the right thing to do.
Doug: Exactly. The only way to fight official corruption is to reduce the amount of legal control of
officials, particularly their regulatory power over the economy. If there were no government regulators,
inspectors, assessors, auditors, and so forth ad nauseam, there'd be no reason for businesses and
consumers to bribe them to get the hell out of the way.
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L: I can hear some people now crying in horror, "But that would be anarchy!" I
know your answer to that is: "Good!" But to keep this conversation a little more
constructive, let's remind people that government regulation is not the only kind
of regulation there is; and, of all forces interacting in the marketplace, it is almost
certainly the least efficient and most likely to produce unintended consequences.
Doug: Yes. There are many market forces that regulate business activity and,
more broadly, cultural forces that regulate interactions between people. In the
marketplace, reputation is a very powerful force. So is competition. And so is
liability: it's a powerful negative incentive. More broadly, culture is a very powerful
regulatory force, which is to say, peer pressure, moral opprobrium, and social
approbation restrain people from being naughty far more than fear of police does.
And there are also private institutions that have powerful regulatory influences,
such as churches, Rotary, Lions Clubs, and the like.
It is precisely because some things are so critical that the government should
never be trusted with them. Universally, in every country and in every culture, it
invites corruption and makes things worse than they would be under private
regulatory arrangements and a more vigilant populace.
Strict regulation leads naïve people to think, "Everything is under control." That
has two important effects. One, it makes them irresponsible: a belief that they
don't have to concern themselves. That general attitude then permeates the
society. Two, regulation always creates distortions in the market. It's like a lid on
a pressure cooker. Everything looks under control until the whole thing blows up.
That's what lies at the root of the concept of "black swan"-type unexpected
events in politics and economics. The black swan lands when the amount of
corruption necessary to evade laws becomes as onerous as the laws
themselves.
Egypt, and the whole Muslim world, is terminally corrupt. Their governments are
scams that serve no purpose but to enrich officialdom. Those worthies, though
they collect salaries, mainly take bribes for an income.
But if there wasn't corruption to work around the laws, every one of those places
would be totally impossible to live in. So it's actually a paradox. Corruption in
government is a bad thing in that it unjustly enriches officials who are betraying a
trust. But it's also a good and necessary thing, in that without it nothing would
happen at all. It's a shaky arrangement that lasts only until the corruption
becomes as bad as the laws themselves. It's like the mercury that was once used
to treat syphilis: too much, and it will kill you as surely as the syphilis.