Negative Quiddity: Graft

Graft, a form of political corruption, is the unscrupulous use of a politician's authority for personal gain. Most governmental systems have laws in place to prevent graft although this does not always halt political corruption.

Examples

A traditional example of political graft is when someone exchanges a political donation for political favor (e.g. ristournes in Quebec or tangenti in Italy). Grafting, however, does not require another individual to be involved. A member of a government may embezzle money directly from government funds, make decisions that benefit his own private economic interests, or simply use inside knowledge of upcoming government decisions to his benefit, in a manner similar to insider trading.

History of Graft

William M. Tweed or "Boss Tweed" was taken out of his position in the New York State Senate to help to prevent graft and other political corruption, but this failed.

Present Day Graft

When USAID helped the Afghan government develop a strategy to pay civil service employees and police officers through mobile phones, it cut out so much graft that employees thought they were actually receiving a 30% raise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graft_(politics)

Comments by the Blog Author

It is the opinion of the blog author, as a certified public accountant who worked as a state fraud examiner, that the progressive political agenda grossly encourages graft as a necessary defense against bureaucracy.

 An example of this can be seen in progressive income taxes.  Corporations and individuals are forced to pay excessive taxes as a kind of extortion that can be redistributed to the “masses.”   Over time, rather than continue to be robbed, they infiltrate the system and complicate it so that the tax code is incomprehensible and full of arcane loopholes.  The net effect after a century or so of such machinations is a lower tax rate in a system that no one understands and no one respects.

Another power grab that essentially requires a canny defense through increasing graft consists of the forest of regulatory agencies in the United States.  It takes decades of counter-attack, but eventually a regulatory agency in charge of something important will itself become packed by those being regulated.  A particularly rapid example of such capture occurred with the Environmental Protection Agency, established by Nixon in 1972 to help him look humane and get re-elected.  By the mid-90s in the Clinton administration, this agency had become “hopelessly politicized,” in the words of Harvard-trained M.D. and successful writer Michael Creighton.

My central point here is that those being needlessly regulated or taxed correctly regard this as an attack and mount a slow defense of their position by the introduction of graft into the garden of regulatory Eden.  They have to do this to survive.