Transparency and accountability - the more easy it is to detect and punish corruption, the less likely it is to come about.
Okay, I like this answer, but I have a rejoinder. The more we tend toward "absolute informational transparency" (to quote William Gibson), the more transparent not only the state becomes, but private individuals become. In other words, informational transparency cannot be limited to transactions between the state and the marketplace. If we have a greater degree of access to the goings-on of corporatist dealings, this means that the state also has a greater degree of access to the privacy of individuals.
Now I'm all for greater informational transparency, but the infiltration of individual privacy yields new contradictions, especially if we're appealing to notions of privacy (and property) as justifications for business (i.e. private) enterprises.
This is where we keep clashing heads - I've already agreed with you that completely eliminating corruption is as impossible as completely eliminating crime, and is therefore not the subject of this discussion. What I'm asking is whether you agree that the country would function better with less corruption.
I think we're about at the conclusion!
So, I fully admit that what I'm about to say is not an attempt at further disagreement, but an admission regarding my perspective. That is, you ask me if I would say that a decrease in corruption would make the country function "better." I cannot bring myself to answer that question because "better" is evaluative, and I do not believe there is any objective space from which to qualify such a distinction.
I do think that less corruption means that individual human lives may be markedly better - maybe even most human lives. But I'm a posthumanist, so this concession immediately makes me start to wonder what this means from the perspective of a nonhuman system. Scientific and theoretical analyses suggest that different scales lead to different notions of "better," and it's plausible to me that acting in the hypothetical interests of a system could also - in the long run - have a positive impact of individual human lives.
So my short answer to your question is yes, I do think less corruption would help the system function better from a human perspective. I do not think anyone can make the claim, however, that less corruption results in an objectively greater degree of functionality.
This is very well argued, but it's a masterwork of abstraction
I
love masterworks of abstraction.
from the human cost of corruption, which is what we should actually be evaluating when selecting which political candidate to vote for. I will say this about that perspective, though: even if corruption were completely eliminated, it would still be a theoretical component of the system - as you've already stated. So you actually have nothing to worry about; were someone like Sanders to be entirely successful in eliminating real world instances of corruption, the systemic potential for it would still exist. So we get the best of both worlds - something theoretically impossible hasn't taken place, but things have still improved.
And here you basically are acknowledging what I said above, which is the human element of systems. These are invaluable, seeing as we are humans (I assume
) and have to look out for our interests. I have an almost automatic tendency to pull back from such commitments, however, to check my own emotions and empathic associations, and to try and look at things from a structural angle. Of course, this is ultimately impossible to do logically; but it isn't impossible to do speculatively...
Also, just a final point. If corruption (i.e. paradox) is a constitutive component of systems, there will always be local manifestations. If internal paradoxes exist, they will always out.
In a general sense, this is kind of what my dissertation is about, although I'm suggesting that we can trace this question back to the mid-twentieth century.
