The Chain of Corruption
Alright, so we have create a government department to do X. But what if the department gets corrupted? When then of course we will create a watchdog to regulate it and investigate it, and keep it clean. But what if the watchdog gets corrupted? Well then we create another watchdog to watch the first watchdog? And what if watchdog 2 will get corrupted? Then we create a 3rd watchdog... and so on... Now we ran out of tax money, and it all falls down.
Yes, this is the fate of every government. They expand, create new departments, they get corrupted, they always get corrupted, there is no way to not be, and then they start creating more government to try to fight against the corruption, and as more and more agencies get corrupted, they keep creating more and more. And then eventually they run out of tax money, and they collapse, bringing the entire economy with it.
I mean what is the Government size to GDP now? Over 60% in certain countries. That's right, so 60% of certain economies is made up of government, of similar structures: 1 department and a chain of infinite watchdogs. You might have 100 people in "important" positions, and you have 50,000 other people watching them and eachother for corruption, but they still get corrupted, and even if they do, they will never prosecute eachother, so the whole setup is phony. How many big government officials have been prosecuted ever? 0.
What a fucking waste of tax dollars. Whatever "service" or "benefits" that department would have given, the costs are too monumental to even consider it.
Like you might get mugged on the street for 100$, so to avoid that we setup a police department that costs millions of dollars yearly, so you are now guaranteed to get robbed 10,000$ for that via taxes. Just weight the costs/rewards of that.
THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION TO CORRUPTION
The ultimate solution for corruption is so easy to figure out. If we are worried that a department gets corrupted, the best solution to guarantee that that department will never get corrupted is to disband it. That's right, no government = no corruption.
I can't believe people can't figure this out. Because whatever problems there are in society, government will never solve it, it will just make it worse, while in the meantime extorting you for a lot of taxes.
So from a possible 100$ mugging, you create a guaranteed 10,000$ extortion racket. That didn't stopped theft, it just made it worse.
If you want to stop muggers, then there are other solutions. But the government will never be one of it.
I am just wondering what these other solutions are against these muggers and other sorts of scum wandering the streets.
If we can form a decentralized voluntary emergency system, then there will be no need for cops, because people in nearby areas could come and help. The response time could be 5-6x faster.
Or other solutions, that will be invented by the free market and entrepreneurs, and not by the government.
Yeah, no way would I want to live in a society where everyone is allowed to carry firearms. Who would decide who's a good citizen? And what would this good citizen do during a difference of opinion? What if this good citizen is a hot-head?
I don't trust a whole society of people, because there are too many different views and too many plain idiots. I would not feel safe to ever leave my home again.
The bad guys will be armed either way.
So it's a question whether the good guys will be armed too to defend themselves against the bad ones?
Muggers have minimum a knife, or maybe a gun too. How can a honest unarmed citizen defend against it?
So an armed citizenry is required to level the playing field. Becasue black markets will always exist, and bad guys will always find a way around the system. So we cannot let the good guys become defenseless victims.
Well, I do like the idea of something like pepperspray. I think it would atleast be a good defense against a knife. Giving everyone firearms would not make me feel safe at all, even if I was allowed to carry one aswell.
I know the bad guys can always get their hands on weapons, but there are a lot of other bad people out there who aren't actually criminals. As I said, what about a random hothead who's disagreeing with someone? This guy does not currently hold a gun, because it's not that easy to come by. What would he do if he had one?
What about a mugger, stealing a handbag? It's a horrible thing to do, but do we need random citizens to shoot this guy dead? I think that's a bit of an overreaction, yet very probable if you hand everyone a gun. Not to even mention the fact that someone, in blind panic, could miss and hit an innocent person.
People can't figure it out because Watchdog #1 tells them: "Go back to sleep, I'm watching the govt." Watchdog #2 says: "Don't worry, go back to sleep, I'm watching Watchdog #1" and so on and so on... So, nobody wakes up! Good article- upvoted!
Ultimately the "corruption" is an individual who has figured out how to gain. Said individual would find other ways to do that if not in government. The answer isn't to eliminate government based on dubious, unsubstantiated, claims of these nested watchdog departments.
Ultimately the real watchdog of government is the people and the press, who have a responsibility to protect themselves by being on the watch for government corruption.
A failure to limit government corruption is a failure of individuals to resist corruption and other individuals to watch and fight it.
The good old surveillance paradox.
I am not aware of any comprehensive study of the nature of corruption. Therefore, I'm working on the intrinsic nature of corruption myself.
In the market process, corruption is renamed collusion. It is the Achilles heel of capitalism and it arises in corporations at the same rate that corruption arises in governments. Some other forms it takes are planned obsolescence, artificial scarcity, and even artificial desire by rebinding instincts of people to create markets. That is all to say it is a systemic property and it appears with absolute certainty given enough time.
The AnCap style solution of disbanding higher organization to eliminate corruption at higher levels does impact the problem. It does eliminate corruption from those levels. It doesn't eliminate corruption altogether but it does pragmatically eliminate Pyramids, space travel, high rises, terraforming, etc. It eliminates any endeavor which implicitly requires the organization of people to act cohesively to accomplish. It is whack-a-mole. The problem re-expresses itself in a different form and place. There is value in whack-a-mole solutions - they are like experiments that give you another instance observation and more information about the rules that define the phenomena.
Corruption exists at the individual level as well, in fact it winds into the individual. The dopamine reward system which has evolved to shape behavior and ensure the survival of species is hijacked by addictions and other behavioral viruses. Viruses are a concise instance of the 'corruption' phenomena. Cryptography is another concise framing with its trust system/code breaker adversarial model. Godel's incompleteness theorem ensures that the competition will be a perpetual part of systems. Informatics supplies the proof of universal computability that enables it to spread to unrelated systems.
I find that corruption is a fundamental feature of information. I think that looking at its anthropic forms can yield useful insights, but the real key to understanding it will come from observing it in its most irreducible forms in physics, thermodynamics, informatics, game theory, etc.
At this point, most will sort of throw their hands up and conclude you should just accept it and focus on something actually solvable. Except, there are some existential implications for mankind that will arrive in the near term future. Without a deep understanding of this to develop defenses, global nuclear war is going to seem like a quaint alternative.
I think your assertion about 'corruption' vs complexity scale bears further consideration.