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asto wrote: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN SAYING? My point was about carrying capacity. Hot or cold snaps do not significantly alter the base carrying capacity o

asto wrote: WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN SAYING? My point was about carrying capacity. Hot or cold snaps do not significantly alter the base carrying capacity of the environment w/o infrastructure. In the US things like parking tickets, DMV fees, etc. are levied with abandon. Why use this approach to generate funds to pay for municipal workers rather than just having them extract bribes? Because the US has the infrastructure to enforce the fees, fines, and penalties. Both constitute minor confiscation of resources and are abetted by the power of the officials involved. Your point about widows being burned alive agrees with my overall argument. It shows a parity between the two civilizations that ought to give us pause when we start feeling to indignant.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago
Why are bribes inferior to levying fees, fines, and penalties? Seriously? The latter involves due process. It also accrues funds to a democratic body instead of to random servants of the state. This removes conflicts of interest, e.g. I'm going to require a billion licences because each licence means I get a bribe. Empirically, corruption hurts the economy and political system. An IIE paper showed that "a one-standard deviation (2.38 point) improvement in the corruption index is associated with over a 4-percentage-point increase in a country's investment rate and over a 1/2-percentage-point increase in the per capita [GDP] growth rate" [1]. Further, Campos and Giovannoni show in their paper Lobbying, Corruption, and Political Influence that while "lobbying and corruption are substitutes...lobbying seems to be a much more effective instrument for political influence than corruption, even in poorer, less developed countries" [2]. [1] http://www.adelinotorres.com/economia/Os%20efeitos%20da%20corrup%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20no%20mundo.pdf http://www.adelinotorres.com/economia/Os%20efeitos%20da%20co... [2] http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/bitstream/10419/33990/1/518050076.pdf http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/bitstream/10419/33990/1/518050...
- grandalf 14y ago
  I have no disagreement with your point. Of course a codified system of fees is preferable to one that is completely ad-hoc and based on bribes. But police officers and other minor officials (IRS workers, etc.) are given tremendous discretion about which violations to enforce and which to ignore. In that sense, the US system is quite ad-hoc as well. And since the people who interact most directly with police officers are the poor, abuses of power are less likely to be reported... yet we still hear of them all the time. I view it as a continuum of institutional evolution, with the US perhaps a small notch or two ahead of India in creating institutions that are resistant to corruption. It's definitely not a night and day distinction.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

Why are bribes inferior to levying fees, fines, and penalties? Seriously? The latter involves due process. It also accrues funds to a democratic body instead of to random servants of the state. This removes conflicts of interest, e.g. I'm going to require a billion licences because each licence means I get a bribe. Empirically, corruption hurts the economy and political system. An IIE paper showed that "a one-standard deviation (2.38 point) improvement in the corruption index is associated with over a 4-percentage-point increase in a country's investment rate and over a 1/2-percentage-point increase in the per capita [GDP] growth rate" [1]. Further, Campos and Giovannoni show in their paper Lobbying, Corruption, and Political Influence that while "lobbying and corruption are substitutes...lobbying seems to be a much more effective instrument for political influence than corruption, even in poorer, less developed countries" [2]. [1] http://www.adelinotorres.com/economia/Os%20efeitos%20da%20corrup%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20no%20mundo.pdf http://www.adelinotorres.com/economia/Os%20efeitos%20da%20co... [2] http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/bitstream/10419/33990/1/518050076.pdf http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/bitstream/10419/33990/1/518050...

grandalf 14y ago
I have no disagreement with your point. Of course a codified system of fees is preferable to one that is completely ad-hoc and based on bribes. But police officers and other minor officials (IRS workers, etc.) are given tremendous discretion about which violations to enforce and which to ignore. In that sense, the US system is quite ad-hoc as well. And since the people who interact most directly with police officers are the poor, abuses of power are less likely to be reported... yet we still hear of them all the time. I view it as a continuum of institutional evolution, with the US perhaps a small notch or two ahead of India in creating institutions that are resistant to corruption. It's definitely not a night and day distinction.