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Comment by galangalalgol | Hacker News Reader

is it that much worse than in the US? my city of ~800k is just finding out our senator and relations found a way to get $500M o federal funds to dramatically increase the value of the land they and their friends bought shortly before the project was started. sadly with as much detail as I provided you probably still can't be sure which city I'm talking about because it happens everywhere. Regulatory capture in the communication, medical, defense, and banking industries is obvious and unchallenged. How bad is Bulgaria?

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Oh wee lamb. Americans just have no idea about the scale of corruption in other countries. The kind of thing you mentioned has always existed in America. I was just reading an article about how they constructed MD450 in Maryland in the 1920s (a highway from DC to Annapolis). There was already a perfectly good mostly concrete paved road between DC and Annapolis (MD214/Central Avenue) at the time, a few miles south of the intended route for MD450. But some of the politicians involved owned land in the northern part of the affected counties, and insisted that a duplicative northern route be built. In the end the highway was obsolete almost soon as it was built, and the John Hansen Highway (now US50) was constructed to interstate freeway standards just a couple of decades later. At the end of the day, this sort of thing is bad but not fatal. It's usually a matter of politicians finding some benefit in a project or policy that can be justified for objective reasons. (E.g. whatever you think about our communications policies, for example, they're supported by a large amount of academic research, and served as the model for regulatory reforms in Europe in the 1990s and 2000s.)

The corruption outside of places like the US is of a completely different sort. It's straight up stealing and bribery. Worse, it infects larger segments of the society and government. At the end of the day, it's not really a big deal if a highway is redundantly built a few miles north of an existing one. But lower-level government workers asking for bribes to do their jobs, widespread tax evasion among ordinary people--that stuff isn't just wasteful, it's fatal to the ability of the country to function. It's basic math--there's relatively few elite, and some corruption at the top doesn't add up to much in terms of the overall economy. But when corruption trickles down to the middle class, it's infected the bulk of your economy.

I'm assuming this comment got flagged because of "oh wee lamb", which I agree is not a good look. The rest of it is a detailed and good faith argument, so I vouched it. It would simplify things for the thread if that first bit could get edited out.

No, someone flagged it before I added that.

Then I'm lost. Who would flag the rest of this?

Clearly someone the author forgot to bribe.

I actually found the that endearing and the post was /. insightful. I'm not convinced that it is somehow less harmful for the 1% to be corrupt than the 10% but it was an idea I had no considered because of my class envy.

Isn’t corruption basically legal in the US under the name of lobbying?

All the PACs and Super PACs that donate endless money, without divulging origin to candidates, so that they’ll push through their agenda?

Like where’s the fiber broadband the government paid billions for to the telecoms?

When I read news about the US that's the impression I've got. I'm from Spain, and we (and our neighbors) are quite vocal about our corruption, but the more I read the more I realize that the stuff that is happening here would be just legal somewhere else.

Here a party receiving money from companies is a big deal.

It's partially (not entirely) a myth about US politics.

The majority of political donations come from individuals.

Obama for example raised $1.23 billion from individual contributions over his political career. Out of about $1.5 billion total.

For Trump, about 60% of his campaign's funding came from individual donations (about $220m), his money included. Trump gave about $66m to his own campaign, or around 20% of all the funding. Supporting PACs spent around $100 million.

Hillary Clinton got about 71% of her campaign funds from individual contributions (around $405m). Her supporting PACs spent around $210m.

For the prominent Ted Cruz vs Beto O'Rourke Texas Senate battle, Cruz got 77% of his funding from individual contributions.

From there you'd have to look into the share of the PAC money that comes from individuals versus companies etc. PACs commonly derive a large share of their funding from individual contributions. For some of that you can get good figures, some of it is shadowy.

Some people donate individually and not from their business because they don't want anyone looking deeply.

Lobbying is legitimate. PACs are a legitimate dilemma. But if the denizens of hackernews decided to pool their money together in order to run ads in support of something, should they be disallowed?

The difference is people are indirectly benefiting in developed countries so actual infrastructure gets built with government funds. In developing nations frequently so much is directly skimmed that the project never does whatever it was supposed to do.

It’s the difference between inefficiency and direct theft.

I would say that the only difference is due process

But having operated in many “corrupt countries” now, I would say that the only difference is due process that you respect

From our perspective we will never respect how Bulgaria cronyism works, and Bulgarians will never respect how American cronyism works

We’ll call ours due process and imagine Bulgarians are sliding money under tables to get anything done, and they’ll flat out call the outcomes of our system corruption as well

(But there are a lot of favors happening outside of the legal framework too)

Exactly! The biggest differences between developed countries and the developing one is not IMO how much regulatory capture and corruption, its only in the scale. And in the developed counties the scale is often so big, its too big to fail.

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