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| Incorruptible Legislatures |
How to Create an Incorruptible
Legislature
By
James L. Gamble III, M.D., M.P.H., M.S.
Before you read this article, you must abandon all preconceptions of government, because what you are about to read will be as radically different from your current understanding of politics as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was 100 years ago compared to the then current understanding of space, time and matter.
First, we must define what is “corrupt” and must understand the difference between honest payments and corrupt bribes.“Corrupt,” according to Webster’s, means “to cause to be dishonest, disloyal, etc., esp. by bribery.” As a result, if someone or something does something to make another person lie, steal or become disloyal, corruption has occurred. The most important word in that definition, when considering legislatures, is “disloyal,” because constituents are hurt when their legislator is disloyal, but we might not consider that a legislator, who lies occasionally to protect the interests of his or her constituents as corrupt. As a result, if a sufficient number of small donors under Campaign Finance reform, who were not constituents like East Coast environmentalists, encouraged a legislator from an Oregon timber district to abandon the interests of his or her constituents, we could still have corruption under Campaign Finance Reform. If, however, a constituent from that district made a contribution to a legislator’s campaign to support legislation that protected the timber or environment interests of other fellow constituents of the same legislator and, thereby, creating greater legislator loyalty to his or her constituents, that payment would be a legitimate. As a result, money in politics is not necessarily corrupting, if it fosters greater legislator loyalty to their constituents.
Corruption in legislatures becomes possible, when a special interest group can focus their financial and political resources in a relatively small area, when their sponsored legislation will cause relatively large returns for that special interest group with relatively small implementation costs like lobbying fees, campaign contributions, etc., and when the costs for the effected consumers are so thinly distributed that the costs to fight the corruption are higher than the costs of the corruption to each consumer. For example, the multimedia companies obtained $60 billion in radio wave rights several years ago for their lobbying costs, but it would have cost constituents $800 to fight these costs. These costs were too small to organize citizens, when many citizens could become free riders and benefit from the effort and finances of citizens, who fought the multimedia companies.
To measure corruption, it is necessary to have a parameter that is relatively free of political bias, because one person’s cause might be seen as another’s corruption. It is, also, necessary to have parameter that is relatively easy to estimate. For example, equality is a parameter for which its value would probably be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to measure. Since economists’ use “efficiency” as a measure of “good” and since corruption like the current security trading scandal results in the waste of resources, “efficiency” from the perspective of consumers should serve as a useful way to determine corruption. Efficiency has an added advantage, because it would allow reformers to pursue inefficiencies like unemployment, drug and alcohol addiction, and even war and terrorism. In addition, productivity might also serve as another useful parameter, if efficiency is maintained. If, however, productivity worsened efficiency as might occur with an increased productivity of cigarettes, productivity would not be a good parameter.
To define efficiency, we need to have an organization that is separate from the
government like a nonprofit foundation. This foundation would n
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