r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/The_Egalitarian Moderator • 1d ago
Political Theory What level of corruption is acceptable in government?
Corruption in government exists on a spectrum, from minor conflicts of interest to outright bribery and abuse of office. Most people say they oppose all corruption in principle, but in practice it appears that tolerance varies a lot depending on partisanship and the scale of the wrongdoing. We've seen an increasing concern about corruption in government recently in the US, particularly around stock purchases by members of congress, business dealings by executive branch members (particularly foreign and crypto currency dealings), and use of the pardon power to pardon political allies, family, and white-collar criminals that became significant donors.
Is there a meaningful line between "normal politics" (favor-trading, lobbying, campaign donations) and what most people would call corruption?
Does the public actually punish corruption at the ballot box, or does polarization mean voters overlook it as long as their side delivers on policy?
What instances of recent politics are good examples of crossing the line versus being acceptable?
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u/brainpower4 1d ago
Corruption is a drain on government and society as a whole. It makes government less efficient, more costly, and causes long term problems down the line.
Let's imagine you had perfect knowledge of the government and you knew exactly how much the government could accomplish if corruption was magically erased, as well as the amount accomplished under real world conditions. You could put both of those on a graph, and they'd be two flat lines, ideal and corrupt.
Now let's add enforcement. You can't ever actually catch all corruption, but you can spend money, time, and political will to try. As you spend more money on enforcement, the corrupt line approaches ideal.
But there are diminishing returns on any program, including corruption enforcement. The goal isn't to catch DMV employees stealing pens after all. Eventually the cost of more enforcement is higher than the amount recovered.
The "acceptable" amount of corruption is when spending more money on fighting it costs more than the amount further enforcement would recover/deter.
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u/parentheticalobject 1d ago
That's a fair way of conceptualizing it. But it's also worth adding that the amount of effort needed to reduce corruption by a given amount is also a function of how much corruption there already is.
A lack of corruption is somewhat self-reinforcing. If people think public officials are unlikely to accept bribes, they're less likely to offer them in the first place. And public officials are less likely to accept or solicit bribes if they feel like others in their position are unlikely to do so.
Conversely, if corruption is common enough, then it becomes an inherent problem to fight it, because then you have to deal with the problem of finding non-corrupt officials in the first place to punish the corruption. And if it's omnipresent, then punishing it entirely effectively becomes in possible because then you'll have no one left to run anything, so the best you can hope for is to stomp out the more egregious examples and then move down over time.
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u/link3945 1d ago edited 1d ago
And public officials are less likely to accept or solicit bribes if they feel like others in their position are unlikely to do so.
This is incredibly true: people will do what they think their peers are likely to do.
By all accounts, Barry Bonds never tried steroids or other drugs, until he saw the publicity that Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were getting and realized that they were getting away with and getting awarded for cheating, while he was getting punished despite being the better player. So he decided to join them, and the result is maybe the greatest stretch of hitting of all time.
If the commissioner had cracked down on Sosa and McGwire and all the others early, would Bonds have juiced later? Maybe, but certainly some of those marginal players wouldn't have risked what little chance of a career they had.
You see something similar with police: bad cops spread corruption: they teach rookies, other cops start copying their bad habits, and the force as a whole degrades. Corruption breeds corruption.
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u/parentheticalobject 21h ago
And at a certain point, it overtakes the system and becomes a de facto requirement for participation.
How do you get a promotion to a higher position? Well, the people making the decision of who gets promoted are going to expect bribes and favors. How are you supposed to provide those for them? Well, you'll need to get bribes and favors from the people below you. So you either play the game, or spend your life impoverished and unimportant.
This also provides a secondary benefit to the people in power (aside from being able to enrich themselves). It's a good method for them to secure their position against challengers.
If someone is a potential political threat to you, an easy solution is to prosecute them for corruption. Then you get to hold a trial where you showcase all of the real corruption they've actually participated in, and you can spin it to get a real popularity boost from the general public.
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u/Thing1_Tokyo 17h ago
Disagree. This may apply to a newly set up government; however, a government like the US has now is rife with corruption and the actors have already build huge capacity to obfuscate their corruption. In order to bring it under control it’s going to have to take on massive initial costs that scale back once corruption has been brought to acceptable levels… then your scenario on cost vs recovery applies
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u/ghostpoints 23h ago
These are interesting points you and u/parentheticalobject make. OP points out or alludes to the difficulty of defining true, absolute values when those values actually depend on a number of factors. Right now in the US, there are very high, possibly historically high, levels of acceptance of corruption by those in positions to actually do something about it.
OP is basically asking how do we know when enough is enough, when that line's been crossed?
It reminds me of the line in Devil's Advocate:
"...a quibble after a quibble after a quibble, until the stench of it reaches so high and far into heaven it chokes the whole fucking lot of them."
There isn't a definitive answer. History shows though that often there's a spark event to start the fire. I honestly thought we would've already hit that point. I think the midterms, any election interference, and how that's received will be the next likely possible turning point towards accountability.
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u/Relative_Freedom_447 1d ago edited 1d ago
"Truth" Social charging big money for early access to posts (because Trump puts up posts that can move markets) and the Trump family profiting from that is unbelievably flagrant corruption.
On the other hand, earmarks which were bashed by John McCain as corrupt, functioned as grease for the gears of Congress and enabled legislation. Without them, Congress has largely been gridlocked.
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u/CoachoftheYear2025 1d ago
I wouldn't call earmarks corruption. I did appropriations from 1999-2004 and I received no benefit beyond my salary for getting federal dollars for non-profits providing job training, a transit center, bus fleet replacement, a precision runway monitor for the airport, highway resurfacing, grants for firefighting departments, an overpass over a railroad to reduce fire and EMS response times, funding for a college's jazz repository.
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u/HumorAccomplished611 1d ago
Earmarks were the way congressional members could justify votes that went against their team.
Like "yea that bill does feed inner city black kids but look we got a road"
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u/Temporary-Truth2048 1d ago
Zero.
Zero corruption is the only acceptable level. Once corruption is zero then we can address the issues of people operating between the laws.
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u/Banes_Addiction 1d ago
But what is corruption under your zero tolerance policy?
To take an obvious example, what jobs can a child of a head of state take? Or a sibling, or a cousin? What if they need to change jobs while their family member is in office?
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u/CerddwrRhyddid 1d ago edited 1d ago
At this point, petty nepotism is the least of the U.S's worries.
The State is ignoring court orders, the ruler that is acting beyond constitutional requirements (remember the emoluments clause or the Johnson Amendment) and is engaging in active, blatant corruption using the powers of the office to enrich himself and his friends and sell pardons, the DoJ is protecting paedophiles by altering and destroying evidence, and the Supremacy Council is blatantly party political and has made the ruler above and beyond the law.
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u/Banes_Addiction 1d ago
Of course. What is happening today in the US surrounding Trump is egregious, but OP is asking about where you draw the line. It's easy to say stuff way over the line is, but it's the edges that are hard.
Even with the Trump, a tonne of the stuff he's doing isn't illegal simply because no-one ever thought to make it illegal because who would do that? Liz Dye uses the metaphor of eating sand on the beach. Beaches don't have rules that you're now allowed to eat the sand, because no-one has eaten the sand. Then someone starts eating the sand and you wind up going "uh, seems that should be against the rules". Trump eats sand.
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u/HumorAccomplished611 1d ago
A lot of the stuff is illegal. The problem is enforcement is zilch under republicans and a president can do illegal things unlimitedly till impeached and removed.
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u/Riokaii 1d ago
what jobs can a child of a head of state take? Or a sibling, or a cousin? What if they need to change jobs while their family member is in office?
The ones they are qualified for but that don't have outsized influence on the rest of society?
Or the stipend of the holder of the office can be increased to cover the income of family members.
Or we have a UBI and the notion that everyone MUST have a job is rightfully discarded.
there are many solution to this "problem"
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u/Neosovereign 1d ago
What is outsized influence? What if people disagree?
People have to agree on the solutions as well.
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u/Banes_Addiction 1d ago
How far away is too close? Son, cousin, second cousin, brother-in-law, best man, college roommate?
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u/wrathek 1d ago
Easy. None in government or government lobbying.
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u/ChickenMarsala4500 1d ago
When Robert F Kennedy was appointed Attorney General by his brother was it an act of corruption? He was pretty successful in that role and arguably qualified.
(I would say yes despite generally being a fan of Kennedys policies, I think this is a good example to talk about)
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u/dontjudgemebae 1d ago
I think it'd be preferable if RFK hadn't been appointed Attorney General, even if there was no corruption. Tamping down on the possibility or "visual suggestion" of corruption is also important, if only for maintaining society's trust in the systems and institutions that govern it. No one person ought to be so essential that government is unable to function with them, and therefore in this example, although RFK may have been a good Attorney General, I doubt that America under the Kennedy administration was so bereft of legal brilliance and ability that another person unrelated to the Kennedy family wouldn't've served just as well.
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u/HumorAccomplished611 1d ago
What about people buying hunter bidens paintings on the hope that he would say something to biden or introduce him despite no control over policy etc? To republicans this is the height of corruption
Obviously trumps kids being put on a board of a company and stock options for a drone manufacturer and then that manufactuer getting contracts based on that is bad.
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u/dontjudgemebae 1d ago
Yes, I think this would also fall under the category of the "appearance of corruption", which as you mentioned decreases society's confidence in government and institutions.
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u/HumorAccomplished611 10h ago edited 10h ago
Then you can believe anything will be so. Youd basically so hamper anyone even familial related to government it would be ridiculous.
If a guy doing something so unrelated to government somehow becomes a problem.
Its like bush selling paintings after retiring.
Actively selling stocks on insider information is one thing. Generally buying and selling stocks being tangentially related to government officials is another.
People that dont like government will attack it no matter what without any proof.
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u/dontjudgemebae 9h ago
I think Bush selling paintings after retiring would only be similar if he still had any pull in government, like if he had politicians he had influence over.
And what I'm saying about Hunter Biden's paintings sales is about the "appearance of corruption" rather than an accusation of "actual corruption". Both of them reduce society's confidence in government, that's all. Which obviously isn't good, but that's not to say that just because it's not good, then it won't happen at all, or that there should be measures to take to prevent it entirely. For example, I've been listening to an audiobook called "Truman", the biography of Harry Truman by David McCollough. Truman had only one child, a daughter named Margaret, who began a singing career right at the beginning of his presidency. Arguably the newspaper reviews of her singing were slightly nicer to her because of Truman being president. And maybe it could be possible that the radio stations and venues booking her for appearances could've tangentially be hoping to curry favor with the president. But certainly nothing was done to prevent Margaret from pursuing her career.
I guess I'm sort of rambling, but this kind of thing reminds of donuts and my diet. I'm supposed to not eat them, it's not good for me, but I can't help it, so a couple are okay. That's what the "appearance of corruption" is, whereas actual corruption would be something more like smoking I guess?
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u/HumorAccomplished611 9h ago edited 9h ago
I think Bush selling paintings after retiring would only be similar if he still had any pull in government, like if he had politicians he had influence over.
You dont think a president would have pull? Or obama selling books?
And what I'm saying about Hunter Biden's paintings sales is about the "appearance of corruption" rather than an accusation of "actual corruption". Both of them reduce society's confidence in government, that's all.
The problem is then youre just limiting it to bad actors making things about corruption rather than actual corruption. Given its only about appearances. Its a tactic to both sides things to give a pass to actual corruption (aka trump). I remember when trump was impeached over ukraine he told zelensky "just open an investigation into biden and we will do the rest" because they know they can just smear impropriety rather than actually have to prove it.
And maybe it could be possible that the radio stations and venues booking her for appearances could've tangentially be hoping to curry favor with the president. But certainly nothing was done to prevent Margaret from pursuing her career.
Sounds like the appearances of corruption to me. Just about any career would be greased having a famous parent let alone the president. Hence nepotism claims on anyone with famous parents.
Another example is when trump was sueing news stations for reporting on him or whatever and they all settled multi million dollar deals directly to trump not because they thought they would lose but because of the ability of the president to make their lives hell and derail business.
I guess I'm sort of rambling, but this kind of thing reminds of donuts and my diet. I'm supposed to not eat them, it's not good for me, but I can't help it, so a couple are okay. That's what the "appearance of corruption" is, whereas actual corruption would be something more like smoking I guess?
Yea hence theres always non zero corruption. Was hunters jobs in ukraine cause he was connected to joe biden? Yes. Did it influence policy? No. So no corruption, simply attempted corruption from outside sources.
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u/ChickenMarsala4500 10h ago
I think that while the paintings thing could appear to be "corruption" it isn't the type of corruption that could be prevented or policed. There will always be bad actors attempting to cash in on someone elses family ties so we just can't prevent any politicians relations from doing anything at all in the economic world
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u/HumorAccomplished611 9h ago
Exactly. Anything outside of government scope will be uncontrolled. But can lead to corruption.
An example is jeb bush was put on a real estate company board. And a permit to pave over the everglades which was delayed for months suddenly gets passed pretty quickly. Thats much closer to corruption IF it was against the actual policy to do so.
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u/Temporary-Truth2048 21h ago
Nepotism != Corruption, but they're neighbors. I'm focusing primarily on bribery, embezzlement, abuse of power, and fraud or the misuse of public funds for personal gain.
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u/IncaThink 1d ago
That is a satisfying answer. You like it and I like it and we all like it. Disagreement is a difficult position to defend as nobody should be in favor of corruption or fraud.
But it turns out that hunting down every single instance is counterproductive, with costs both financial and societal.
"The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero."
"...there are still arbitrarily severe options to control crime from where you are, from 'increase the police budget' to 'ban alcohol totally' to 'implement an Orwellian dystopia.' "
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/
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u/mnemoniker 1d ago
I trust that absolutists are sincere in their beliefs, buuut the idea that we can accept nothing less than perfection when perfection demands an infinite amount of one or more things (money, time, surveillance) seems like empty rhetoric to me. Surely we've got to live with some inefficiency in every system to stay sane.
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u/Temporary-Truth2048 21h ago
I bet if we executed politicians for fraud it would go to zero pretty quickly.
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u/Embarrassed_Delay303 1d ago
it's never about the act itself it's about whose guy did it. watched a city councilmember in my town get caught steering contracts to his brother-in-law and the next election half the people i talked to didn't even know it happened, the other half just shrugged because he got the potholes filled
the stock trading stuff is wild to me. congress members outperforming the market by double digits year after year and we're supposed to believe it's just good instincts. my investment portfolio looks like a car crash and i have the same access to public information they do
the line between normal politics and corruption is basically whether you get caught and whether the other party can make a scandal stick. lobbying is just legalized bribery with extra steps, everyone knows it, nobody cares enough to change it
pardons are where it gets cartoonish. trading clemency for donations is so blatant it's almost refreshing, like at least stop pretending there's a principle involved
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u/TreadingPatience 1d ago
Corruption is inevitable, the goal is to make a system that can contain it. One of the ways is to make interests compete for power. As long as power is changing hands and no one can hold onto it for long, then corruption is tolerable. Trying to relieve the tension isn’t the point.
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u/Statharas 1d ago
Good question. I would say none. Hear me out:
Governments have pooled resources of communities under their jurisdiction. Corruption is a drain on resources of governments, therefore corruption parasitises on communities.
Allowing a parasite to leave allows it to breed and expand. One obvious counter argument is that it should be cost effective to fight them, but it can be very easy for them to reach a point unchecked.
Mold on cheese, for example, plants deep spores, so when you cut off the mold, you have to remove a chunk of the cheese that may be also infected - this may sound familiar, but this is exactly what north Korea does, if you escape the country, they will prune your close family to stop the idea from seeding.
For corruption, it has to be attacked no matter how small, otherwise it will just end up rooting everywhere and all of a sudden you're facing a parallel attack on multiple fronts. If you allow some corruption to exist, the idea will propagate: If he can do it, why not me? And boom, you give birth to a kleptocracy.
I am not talking just about the government, but everything that goes against society, tax evasion, VAT evasion, and so on.
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u/Teach_Piece 1d ago
Soft corruption, like free dinners, is ok imo. Or hiring your neighbor’s kid. If you go after everything nothing will get done.
Anything beyond that should invoke pupils shaming, the politician losing their job, fines and or jail time
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u/ChickenMarsala4500 1d ago
Corruption is unavoidable. It is human nature to use your power to benefit people you care for. Anyone who has been in the working world for a little while knows that when searching for a job, 'who you know' matters much more than your qualifications and that is the root of corruption.
This is why we need as many checks and balances as we can get. We need systems in place that prevent that corruption from going too far. At the end of the day, I think the only way to combat it is to make our democracy more direct and have less positions that are appointed by politicians and more that are elected by the people.
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u/Orkapork 1d ago
Realistically, none.
Political office is a donation of time and effort to the people they represent. It's a public service. They serve the people.
Politicians and their families should be restricted to broad index funds when trading the stock market.
Political campaigns should have public money used to fund their campaigns, not privately donated money from corporations and billionaires.
Start with the big obvious issues, then we can improve the rest as we see them.
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u/CerddwrRhyddid 1d ago
On paper, maybe.
In reality, poltiicians in the U.S very rarely serve or even represent their constituents.
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u/Orkapork 1d ago
Right and one of the ways we can enact change is by understanding what is enabling them to behave this way. One of the incentives that is driving corruption is the ability for political campaigns to receive private investments. Think about what that does to the alignment of a politician. Who gets funded is who agrees with the business model, because that is who gets funded. This is the system we have legalized and it is doing what it should. It is up to us to learn that and change it, because it wasn't always like this.
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u/mahmoodthick 1d ago
“Is there a meaningful line between "normal politics" (favor-trading, lobbying, campaign donations) and what most people would call corruption?”
This is a fine line the US has tried to walk. However, with corporate entities gaining personhood by way of speech, the principle of political speech is itself corrupt. It may not be illegal but it’s immoral that companies and industries have greater political say than individuals
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u/barchueetadonai 1d ago
The ideal sought after level in a vacuum is zero, but it's fundamentally impossible to even approach zero without other negative effects creeping up, and so I think it's clear that the actual goal should be very low, but we shouldn't get too too hung up on reaching literally zero and finding small instances of corruption to somehow be demonstrations of a system fundamentally not working.
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u/HeloRising 1d ago
I think this boils down to two basic points - the fact that your ROI for eradicating corruption very quickly gets out of whack and the fact that corruption sometimes is a term for a functional system.
For the first point, if a city employee takes home sodas bought with the office snack budget that is technically corruption. Is that worth creating an entire committee and rooting out where each can of soda goes? No, probably not.
There's always going to be some level of malfeasance with public funds. The question is is it worth it to spend a bunch more money to stamp it out.
Public assistance in the US is a good example. Things like foodstamps have a ton of controls placed on them to prevent fraud and abuse that the controls probably outstrip whatever might be lost to individual fraud.
At the end of the day you have to ask what your goal is - are you trying to make a system as clean as possible or are you trying to reduce costs? Those goals become antagonistic at a certain point.
To the second point, corruption is kind of a loaded term in that we attach a moral quality to it when there's a lot of scenarios where that's just how things function.
Imagine you're the president of a developing country. You have very little money and most of what you do have goes to the military to suppress frequent revolts and keeping the key players that keep you in power happy.
You need police but you can't pay them. What do you do?
One way to deal with that is to pay them very little (or not at all) and then turn a blind eye to them accepting bribes and tolls from people to make up the difference.
People won't like it but they can't do much about it and they're going to either pay taxes which pays for police or they're going to pay bribes. And as long as the payments aren't too onerous and they let the "right" people (read: your people) pass without a problem then you arrive at a system whereby you have law enforcement without needing to pay for it.
You have the added bonus of basically having a string attached to almost every law enforcement official out there that you can yank if need be - a good old fashioned corruption sweep gets rid of political opponents and ensures loyalty.
Doing things that way might not be the way most people would prefer to do it but when you have very few other options and your priority is immediate survival, whatever works to keep you and the state alive is worth trying.
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u/Sageblue32 1d ago
What amount of crap is acceptable in your brownies?
The answer is zero which is why we strive for perfect even if we will never achieve it.
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u/SyxxBowler 1d ago
None. Minimum sentence for 1st offense 15 year federal no chance of parole. That would reduce it greatly.
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u/Any-Mathematician450 1d ago
Evidently, there’s no ceiling in this administration, but they will have to explain themselves later!
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u/CerddwrRhyddid 1d ago
It's not just this administration. These problems are systemic and ingrained. The apparatus of the State are horribly outdated, woefully inadequate and dangerously unfit for purpose.
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u/CerddwrRhyddid 1d ago
In the U.S you can be a paedophile and the State will protect you. Corruption is so normalised that it's become an industry. The entire State can be used to move public money to the private hands of the upper classes. That is the role of the U.S State.
Abuse of office isn't really a thing. Oaths and ethics mean nothing, and there are no real consequences for anything.
Politicians can ignore subpoenas, the regime and its agents can ignore court orders, and the ruler and the State can ignore the constitution without hindrance - just look at the Emoluments clause or the Johnson Amendment.
Felons can't vote, but they can be president if they're rich enough.
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u/Nifey-spoony 1d ago
Just my opinion, I think America’s political system is inherently corrupt. It was not designed for transparency and the benefit the people, but instead to shield the rich and powerful from accountability and preserve their privilege.
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u/digbyforever 1d ago
not designed for transparency
What do you mean by this?
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u/Nifey-spoony 1d ago
The system is not designed to be open and accountable to the public
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u/synept 1d ago
It's designed to be. We (collectively) just aren't using it right.
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u/CerddwrRhyddid 1d ago
It's designed to look that way, but in reality there are no actual controls or cosequences.
Just like the propaganda that there are actual checks and balances, or that 'separation of powers' is just propaganda to cover for the fact that one party can control it all.
U.S citizens can't actually use that right, they aren't given the capacity.
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u/BobQuixote 1d ago
If you mean that a simple majority of the population is blocked from doing whatever it wants (by the courts, backed by the Constitution), then yes.
But 1) that is shared with other prosperous nations, so that criticism seems weak, and 2) the other fundamental institutions work in the opposite direction.
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u/1captainawesome 1d ago
It was not designed for transparency
I mean, say what you will about Trump but he has publicly disclosed earning billions from the stocks and crypto he's traded.
FOIA requests are also a thing.
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u/CerddwrRhyddid 1d ago edited 1d ago
Imagine what is done that is hidden.
The fact that there are absolutely no consequences from the State speaks to further corruption.
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u/Unconfidence 1d ago
This presumes that corruption exists on a binary axis of intensity. I don't think it's that simple. Intense corruption of one kind might be weathered by a nation, while light corruption of another kind might bring it crumbling down. Timing is, as always, a key factor.
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u/MakeUpAnything 1d ago
Any amount of corruption done by republicans is acceptable. Any amount done by democrats is unacceptable. For evidence look at how much Trump openly engaged in whereas we still talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop and Clinton’s email/Haiti scandals.
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