Where are you on a law - bureaucracy - corruption spectrum?
Let's give corruption its due: Cabernet sauvignon and Manchego cheese are regulated rot, made beautiful. And fallen trees make good fertilizer for undergrowth.
But among people, corruption is a form of friction in the machinery of trust. Despite caveat emptor, economies thrive where trust rules. From a social perspective, trust depends on sincerity, competence, and reliability. From an economic perspective, though, even the most intimate trust, depends on governance and law, supported by rules that allow transparency, predictability, and fairness.
At one end of a corruption spectrum, think of bribes or turning a blind eye to crimes. At the other, think of self-serving bureaucracy. The latter can measure its corruption by asking whether it conduces to those three terms: transparency (availability of information), predictability (efficiency of function), and fairness (freedom from irrational prejudice).
The Economist publishes a ranking of countries by corruption, including public-service corruption. The US is not at the very top of their good-guys list.
As we watch events unfold against corrupt governments in the Middle East, including monarchies or aristocracies, let us take care not to link these types of rule with corruption. A free-market democracy, which requires a bureaucracy to function, risks corruption equally, especially when the bureaucracy makes the rules for that democracy. At the very least, a bureaucracy badly governed is prone to self-preservation rather than ensuring transparency, predictability, and fairness.
Consider: A classical caste society restricted social mobility. You couldn't just earn (or buy) a title and move up a level. And yet, within and across the caste levels, people could trust each other enough to improve their conditions, if transactions are transparent, predictable, and fair.
As the story goes, a breach of trust among aristocrats sent the Greeks to level Troy. In the epic account of that war, Odysseus smacks "a man of the people" on the back with his sceptre, but makes logical argument with one of his peers. Caste? Yes. Corruption? No. Some describe the Iliad as the first illustration of a Western republic, because the leaders gathered together in honest debate to resolve their issues. There's also a long and beautiful discussion between two noble warriors, Sarpedon and Glaukos, who ask each other why they must stand at the forefront of the battle. The answer? They are publicly accountable for the choicest goods that they enjoy for being aristocrats.
Bureaucrats need not be cowardly or servile. The ancient Chinese invented a grueling Civil Service Exam to cull the best-educated and most ethical workers for an effective administration. Confucianism evolved as a practical and ethical philosophy to help this system maintain internal--even personal--checks and balances on a civil service that might risk serving itself, instead of serving its ends. In short, education was a check against the corruption of self-dealing. Education did not just provide skills. It provided ethical foundation of an economy that could count on transparency, predictability, and fairness.
Fast forward about 7,000 years. Early Modern bureaucracy in Europe (from about 1450 on) was a way to free up economies of scale in a way that benefited centralized governments. It increased control, yes, but it also provided information exchange. Early bureaucrats in remote areas informed the locals about centralized laws, and gathered high-quality information in notebooks (along with tribute/rent/taxes) to send to the Court. On the strength of this transparency, the Court in turn used these notebooks and reports to decide what would be predictable and fair for the federated markets governed locally by nobility and merchants.
Fast forward to now. Debate in Washington about right-sizing regulations focuses on these same questions. It's not really a matter, as Tea Party activists suggest, of what the American people want, or of confiscatory federal trade unionists, or of a blunt-object reduction of government spending. It's a question of having an efficient free-market democracy. If an administrative program acts to preserve itself, even if it's led by honorable people, it may, from an economic welfare perspective, stand somewhere in the darker side of the corruption spectrum.
Where does your work stand on this spectrum? For the sake of what are you working? And if you can't answer that, what are you doing to move it where it needs to be?