Political Theory

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

ToxicAssets — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:41:03 GMT

Comprehensive welfare is not the same as socialism.

That's what every liberal and most braindead conservatives believe, but that's false. That's precisely the opposite of what Hayek was trying to say in the Road to Serfdom.

In that book he warned that the pursuit of social security through socialism is a dangerous path to tyranny.

But socialism is defined as any political doctrine or ideology that defends the concentration and amplification of political powers wielded by a central authority government.

So, in that precise sense, the nordic countries and switzerland are NOT socialist.

They may have higher taxes and they may have the welfare system. They may have had their decades of social democratic rule.

But they have no central planning going on nor central authorities. Taxes are spent improving the communities where they were collected.

And, with the exception of Finland, they all declined the European Union/Eurozone full-membership. That's because they understand that it's better to keep their bureaucrats close. They realized that the whole thing was a socialist ploy designed to move government to Brussels and Strasbourg and away from their constituents, where they can project their evil more effectively.

A local hospital or school funded by local tax-payers is not socialism.

Socialism is what goes on inside the Kremlin, or in Brussels or D.C.

Socialism is the Patriotic Act. Socialism is the Q.E. rounds and the Wall St. bailouts. Socialism is the Greek financial tragedy. Socialism is UN Agenda 21.

That is, a bunch of technocrats in some distant place affecting decisions that impact the lives of millions of flesh and bone people but who they perceive as being abstract statistics.

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

Clayton — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 02:51:55 GMT

+1 Marko

Clayton -

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

Marko — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 02:38:20 GMT

Not necessarily. I would say that it's more of a function of the culture and ethics of the society.

Or it could be a function of state programming. It is possible Scandinavians believe there is a moral difference to using state power to pursue goals that appear to them to be in the national-state interest, but assume using the same for their private interest is not. Meanwhile the Africans are not so brainwashed and know both are morally coordinate. (Ie one is just as bad as the other, therefore if you're a state official there is no reason not to line up your pockets, instead of foolishly spending the money on various government initiatives.)

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

Clayton — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 22:19:28 GMT

IF THE STATE, THEN, is a vast engine of institutionalized crime and aggression, the “organization of the political means” to wealth, then this means that the State is a criminal organization, and that therefore its moral status is radically different from any of the just property-owners that we have been discussing in this volume. And this means that the moral status of contracts with the State, promises to it and by it, differs radically as well. It means, for example, that no one is morally required to obey the State (except insofar as the State simply affirms the right of just private property against aggression). For, as a criminal organization with all of its income and assets derived from the crime of taxation, the State cannot possess any just property. This means that it cannot be unjust or immoral to fail to pay taxes to the State, to appropriate the property of the State (which is in the hands of aggressors), to refuse to obey State orders, or to break contracts with the State (since it cannot be unjust to break contracts with criminals). Morally, from the point of view of proper political philosophy, “stealing” from the State, for example, is removing property from criminal hands, is, in a sense, “homesteading” property, except that instead of homesteading unused land, the person is removing property from the criminal sector of society—a positive good.

...

Let us consider in this light the question of bribery of government officials. We saw above, that, in a free society or free market, the briber is acting legitimately, whereas it is the bribee who is defrauding someone (e.g., an employer) and therefore deserves prosecution. What of bribery of government officials? Here a distinction must be made between “aggressive” and “defensive” bribery; the first should be considered improper and aggressive, whereas the latter should be considered proper and legitimate. Consider a typical “aggressive bribe”: a Mafia leader bribes police officials to exclude other, competing operators of gambling casinos from a certain territorial area. Here, the Mafioso acts in collaboration with the government to coerce competing gambling proprietors. The Mafioso is, in this case, an initiator, and accessory, to governmental aggression against his competitors. On the other hand, a “defensive bribe” has a radically different moral status. In such a case, for example, Robinson, seeing that gambling casinos are outlawed in a certain area, bribes policemen to allow his casino to operate—a perfectly legitimate response to an unfortunate situation.

Defensive bribery, in fact, performs an important social function throughout the world. For, in many countries, business could not be transacted at all without the lubricant of bribery; in this way crippling and destructive regulations and exactions can be avoided. A “corrupt government,” then, is not necessarily a bad thing; compared to an “incorruptible government” whose officials enforce the laws with great severity, “corruption” can at least allow a partial flowering of voluntary transactions and actions in a society. Of course, in neither case are either the regulations or prohibitions, or the enforcement officials themselves, justified, since neither they nor the exactions should be in existence at all.

Murray Rothbard - Ethics of Liberty, 24 (The Moral Status of Relations to the State)

Clayton -

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

martinuspolonus — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 21:50:47 GMT

Scandinavian countries are honest,but not because they are socialist.

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

Marko — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 07:07:45 GMT

""I know of no better measure of corruption.""

whats wrong with using the total amount of expenditures added to the total amount of revenue collected?

Har! Har! They take money, and then they spend it. What's that if not corruption!

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

Bogart — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 04:47:02 GMT

Their governments are not trying to govern the entire planet.

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

Rodolphe Topffer — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 04:13:22 GMT

So as promised, I posted my results in this thread. Briefly, more freedom is not associated with higher corruption.

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

Malachi — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 01:01:55 GMT

""I know of no better measure of corruption.""

whats wrong with using the total amount of expenditures added to the total amount of revenue collected?

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

vive la insurrection — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 01:01:18 GMT

Wow, walked into that one.

I'll take your word on it

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

Rodolphe Topffer — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:59:40 GMT

For your information, I'm actually working on SPSS. I could perform some multiple regression, and/or partial/part correlation if you wish. I have some data. For economic freedom, there is the commonly used "Economic Freedom of the World" (the 2012 Annual Report is the one I would like to use). Here's the link. For the index of corruption, the only one I have found, and also often used in a peer-reviewed paper (to my knowledge), is the Corruption Perception Index also known as (CPI). Here's the link. I know of no better measure of corruption. If you have some suggestions, I could add those (better) data in my SPSS file. But for now, I haven't yet finished writing all the data in my files. The economic freedom index in the link has five component, + a summary ratings. In another words, 6 values for each countries, and I want the years too, (i.e., 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010). So this means 12 values for each countries. It takes a lot of time to type those figures and check if I reported them right.

If you wish, I will post the results later.

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

vive la insurrection — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:43:48 GMT

Good thing AE tends to be hyper skeptical / apathetic of probably any method used to achieve such results - it probably doesn't pass a test of basic subjectivism

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

Al_Gore the Idiot — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:10:01 GMT

Agree with ToxicAssets. Additionally, those four countries have something that's close to a balanced budget.

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

ToxicAssets — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:31:12 GMT

The problem is with your government metrics.

You are basically taking the Budget-GDP ratio as a proxy to the "size of government".

This is very flawed. Some countries are literally tyrannies without necesseraly having large official budgets. All African countries and to a lesser extent, Russia, China and most of Latin America (with the exception of Chile) follow such pattern.

And Scandinavia and Switzerland have high Budget-GDP ratios, but their governments are very small, in the sense of disposable political power.

The main reason is because government there is very local. Most decisions about spending public money are taken by local officials who are held accountable by their neighbors, and not by some nameless electorate.

In the case of Switzerland descentralization was the main theme since the inception of the Confoederatio Helvetica in the middle ages. As for the northern countries, it's mainly an indirect consequence of their populations being small and concentrated in a few locations.

Centralized governments tend to be more corrupt and pervasive because the consequential players are federal level representatives and bureaucrats safely insulated from their constituencies and therefore able to pull all sorts of scams.

Germany is also less corrupt than France and Britain due to similar reasons, eventhough all of them are very centralized.

So it's not something cultural, since corruption was very intense in the DDR and the Weimarer Republik/Deutsches Reich, because of centralization.

A Budget-GDP ratio metric does not capture this. Actually a Budget-GDP ratio is not useful for comparisons between different systems, since other variables play a larger role. It's used mainly because it's simple to compute and understand, and not because it's meaninful.

Re: More Government = Less Corruption

Neodoxy — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:24:59 GMT