As the smoke clears, the picture gets no clearer. What did she know? Was it a criminal gang?
Was it someone in government? Is there even a difference? Corruption is, rightly, today’s hot-button
issue. Many are angry, they should be. Many say corruption is rife, they are right. They clamour for
change, but of what sort? Will electing the right people really make a difference?
The old aphorism is true: power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I have heard nobody since
the tragedy ask the right questions or propose a solution that can work. Are we seriously trying to
understand the nature of corruption? Will trying to do the same thing over and over ever yield different
results?
Luckily, corruption is a solvable problem. To solve it requires an understanding of where it comes from.
It does not come from bad people, it does not come from greed. We are all imperfect, we are all greedy.
Corruption comes from power. To solve it, requires the confiscation of power from the political class and
its rightful return to the people as individuals.
To remove all power from government is an absurd extreme, a straw-man that would suggest I am in
favour of anarchy. But to understand the relationship between power and corruption is logical, to see it as
a sliding scale; the more power, the more corruption, is borne out by the evidence. If we had less political
power, we would have less corruption. Having no government power whatsoever is as undesirable as
having no corruption whatsoever is impossible. Power corrupts, a little power corrupts a little.
So what then, specifically? Where to start? Government is responsible for many many areas that it was
previously not responsible for. This gives ministers and bureaucrats so many opportunities to award
contracts to their friends, reward their backers and accept money under the table to help them make up
their minds when deciding on policy.
In a simple and topical example, if the government was not in charge of energy procurement, there would
be no way that any alleged wrongdoing would even have been possible in the Azerbaijani scandal. Do
you think that shareholders in a private company would have accepted a CEO's decision to buy energy
from anything but the best source? Alas, when it comes to the public interest, politicians, as well as
everyone else, knows that what is good for them, is good for the country.
This is human nature, and it is a good thing, that when guided by the invisible hand of the free market, our
self-interest guides us to do good to the general public, even though this was not our intention. To pine on
socialist morality totally ignores this human nature, with predictable results. Alas again, we do not need
to predict the results. Friends, we have seen this movie before.
Our choice then, is clear to me. One option is that we blame the few bad eggs or the many bad eggs, and
change one colour of politicians for another. Hope in vain that this new crop of leaders is superhuman,
un-human that they will self-sacrifice themselves for the greater good. This will not work, they will be as
corrupt as those they replace, or more so. If they are not, they will become so.
Another option then is to dilute political power, separate and ring-fence it. More watch-dogs. Watch-dogs
watching dogs. This is progress; there will be more people to bribe. Each one for less, to the extent of
their power. It will also increase the cost of government. And does it even work? This has also been tried.
In software we ask “who guards the guards?” A single point of failure is sufficient. If such re-organisation
could work, the Soviet Union would have defeated corruption.
The right option is to open our eyes. Our leaders, past present and future, blue, red, green and yellow are
not at fault. The fault is our own; for letting them get away with the usurpation of so much power. Of
course it will corrupt them, have you not heard that power corrupts? If the recent tragedy was indeed the
result of some government corruption, we should punish the political class collectively by never trusting
them again with so much. The children have run amok, we have to take their toys away and return to the
time when we took responsibility for ourselves.
Leipzig, January 8th 2018
TLDR:
The only effective way to reduce corruption is to reduce government power.
The only effective way to reduce corruption is to reduce government power.
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| Clouds on Europe's horizon |
