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Hot take: I think it should be legal to offer a bribe and illegal to accept a bribe. For example, I don’t think it’s immoral to offer a crooked cop in Mexico $

Hot take: I think it should be legal to offer a bribe and illegal to accept a bribe. For example, I don’t think it’s immoral to offer a crooked cop in Mexico $20 to walk away from a dangerous situation. In your example, it’s not your fault politicians are accepting bribes. So you can either do it or go out of business. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. I think it would do a good job of weeding out bribes too. Because people offering bribes also get a form of blackmail - they don’t go to jail if they come clean but the other side does! I really think it would actually end up net-positive. What do you think?

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
So here's how the corruption under the existing system works. Richard is a US Senator. It's illegal for him to accept bribes and illegal for anyone to offer them, and there may even be some laws prohibiting him and his immediate family from accepting "gifts" over a certain amount. But there is nothing illegal about, say, hiring the Senator's brother-in-law to be a director on some company's board in exchange for a salary with at least six or seven digits in it. After all, the brother-in-law has to work somewhere. So the company offers Richard's brother-in-law the job, and then goes to Richard and asks him to advance the company's position on some bill. If Richard votes the way the company wants, the brother-in-law gets the money. If not, the offer falls through. Nobody actually goes to the Senator and says "do what we want and you'll get the money", it's just understood that it's what will happen, and then the families of government officials become conspicuously wealthy. If you legalize the offer and then someone goes to Richard and offers him a bribe, he declines, because of course he wouldn't accept a bribe, are you crazy? It's a crime to accept a bribe. So then nobody does that even if it's legal for them, anybody who tries is immediately suspected of wearing a wire and any explicit offers of a bribe are emphatically declined. But they still offer his brother-in-law a job, not formally in exchange for anything, but still with the implied understanding that the job is contingent on the votes.
- Paradigma11 2y ago
  Why bother: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/business/crypto-mogul-trump-coins-civil-fraud-charges/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/business/crypto-mogul-tru...
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    So this is a good example for a different reason than you think. Let's consider the short history of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin was invented and a lot of idealists had a lot of hope that it would bank the unbanked, wrest control of the payments system away from the incumbent oligopoly, solve microtransactions for decentralized systems, etc. It also generated a lot of hype, which attracts fraudsters. Fraud has been illegal for a long time and you can prosecute fraud without shutting the whole system down, but wait, what was that thing there on the list of things cryptocurrency was supposed to do? Disrupt the incumbents? Then somehow, for some reason, the rules around cryptocurrency ended up not being the ones narrowly tailored to stamp out fraud, but instead being the ones that swamp ordinary people with paperwork if they try to use it for any of the neat things it was supposed to be good for. Which killed those things before they could become too big to fail, which left only the crimes, which turned public opinion against the concept. Which allowed the government to start really smashing things up. Then you get a candidate who supports the now-hated thing that was once a hope. They put their money where their mouth is and get into the industry, and then once in office they start reforming the laws to not be so harsh and end some of the existing prosecutions, including of people who might have been involved with their previous ventures. Is that corruption or is that just what they're supposed to do when they're supportive of something? You can cast it either way, which is the problem, because then people will want to choose how to characterize it based on whether the target is in their preferred party.
- ccorcos 2y ago
  Good point — my idea doesn’t really solve the “legal corruption” issue in politics today… That might just be inherent to politics unfortunately. It’s a zero sum game. I just read The Machiavellians by James Burnam and I like how it talks about realities as opposed to ideals. I’m not sure it’s possible to create a set of rules to prevent this. Maybe eunuchs like the Ottomans?
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The general way to do it is checks and balances. For example, the intended purpose of the US Senate was to represent the interests of the states in the federal government and US Senators were originally elected by the state legislatures. Then US Senators would generally oppose federal spending because federal taxes and state taxes come out of the same pockets and the state legislators electing the federal Senators would rather choose how to spend the money themselves. It's not a coincidence that federal spending permanently exploded almost immediately after the passage of the 17th amendment. But if you keep spending programs at the state level then the states have to compete with each other. If one state has high taxes and is blowing the money on corrupt boondoggles and another either has lower taxes or is spending the money on things that actually benefit the public, people and businesses move to the less corrupt state and the more corrupt state gets punished with a smaller tax base. They likewise have to compete on the basis of regulatory efficiency, which is why federal regulations were originally intended to be limited to things directly impacting interstate and international activity. But we broke that too and now we've got a bit of a mess.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

So here's how the corruption under the existing system works. Richard is a US Senator. It's illegal for him to accept bribes and illegal for anyone to offer them, and there may even be some laws prohibiting him and his immediate family from accepting "gifts" over a certain amount. But there is nothing illegal about, say, hiring the Senator's brother-in-law to be a director on some company's board in exchange for a salary with at least six or seven digits in it. After all, the brother-in-law has to work somewhere. So the company offers Richard's brother-in-law the job, and then goes to Richard and asks him to advance the company's position on some bill. If Richard votes the way the company wants, the brother-in-law gets the money. If not, the offer falls through. Nobody actually goes to the Senator and says "do what we want and you'll get the money", it's just understood that it's what will happen, and then the families of government officials become conspicuously wealthy. If you legalize the offer and then someone goes to Richard and offers him a bribe, he declines, because of course he wouldn't accept a bribe, are you crazy? It's a crime to accept a bribe. So then nobody does that even if it's legal for them, anybody who tries is immediately suspected of wearing a wire and any explicit offers of a bribe are emphatically declined. But they still offer his brother-in-law a job, not formally in exchange for anything, but still with the implied understanding that the job is contingent on the votes.

Paradigma11 2y ago
Why bother: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/business/crypto-mogul-trump-coins-civil-fraud-charges/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/business/crypto-mogul-tru...
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  So this is a good example for a different reason than you think. Let's consider the short history of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin was invented and a lot of idealists had a lot of hope that it would bank the unbanked, wrest control of the payments system away from the incumbent oligopoly, solve microtransactions for decentralized systems, etc. It also generated a lot of hype, which attracts fraudsters. Fraud has been illegal for a long time and you can prosecute fraud without shutting the whole system down, but wait, what was that thing there on the list of things cryptocurrency was supposed to do? Disrupt the incumbents? Then somehow, for some reason, the rules around cryptocurrency ended up not being the ones narrowly tailored to stamp out fraud, but instead being the ones that swamp ordinary people with paperwork if they try to use it for any of the neat things it was supposed to be good for. Which killed those things before they could become too big to fail, which left only the crimes, which turned public opinion against the concept. Which allowed the government to start really smashing things up. Then you get a candidate who supports the now-hated thing that was once a hope. They put their money where their mouth is and get into the industry, and then once in office they start reforming the laws to not be so harsh and end some of the existing prosecutions, including of people who might have been involved with their previous ventures. Is that corruption or is that just what they're supposed to do when they're supportive of something? You can cast it either way, which is the problem, because then people will want to choose how to characterize it based on whether the target is in their preferred party.
ccorcos 2y ago
Good point — my idea doesn’t really solve the “legal corruption” issue in politics today… That might just be inherent to politics unfortunately. It’s a zero sum game. I just read The Machiavellians by James Burnam and I like how it talks about realities as opposed to ideals. I’m not sure it’s possible to create a set of rules to prevent this. Maybe eunuchs like the Ottomans?
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  The general way to do it is checks and balances. For example, the intended purpose of the US Senate was to represent the interests of the states in the federal government and US Senators were originally elected by the state legislatures. Then US Senators would generally oppose federal spending because federal taxes and state taxes come out of the same pockets and the state legislators electing the federal Senators would rather choose how to spend the money themselves. It's not a coincidence that federal spending permanently exploded almost immediately after the passage of the 17th amendment. But if you keep spending programs at the state level then the states have to compete with each other. If one state has high taxes and is blowing the money on corrupt boondoggles and another either has lower taxes or is spending the money on things that actually benefit the public, people and businesses move to the less corrupt state and the more corrupt state gets punished with a smaller tax base. They likewise have to compete on the basis of regulatory efficiency, which is why federal regulations were originally intended to be limited to things directly impacting interstate and international activity. But we broke that too and now we've got a bit of a mess.