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I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in Russia. The US doesn't even come remotely close. You can look up corruption indexes, Russia is near most c

I think you underestimate the extent of corruption in Russia. The US doesn't even come remotely close. You can look up corruption indexes, Russia is near most corrupt, US somewhere in the bottom quartile iirc. A quick example from my industry - roughly 1/3 of the ~USD $3 billion spent on the new Russian spaceport is unaccounted for (stolen). I assure you that's many orders of magnitude worse than the contracts in play at Cape Canaveral. A good (extremely depressing) film to watch is "Leviathan" (2014).

vintermann 5y ago
First, I was mostly thinking about historical corruption in the US, i.e. in the age of Robber Barons, which was really incredibly bad. I agree there's probably less of the "money just unaccounted for" type of corruption in the US (though it does happen, especially in connection with wars and intelligence agencies), and certainly less petty bribes. But that may just be a symptom of more organized corruption, so that it isn't necessary to let to many lower instances have a cut. In short, there may be more legal ways to divert public trust to private gain, so that the petty sort is just pointlessly risky.