Corruption

Nobody asked but …

I heard a radio program, this morning addressing the issue of politicians accused of dirty politics in our justice system.  In the particular cases, the alleged corruption-mongers skated based on narrow technical interpretations of laws under which the prosecution had, perhaps unwisely, chosen to proceed.  The short-term lesson seemed to be that the laws were not sufficient to stop the corrupt behavior.

SJWs were clamoring to make the laws tighter and tougher and more specific.

Well, here’s the rub, and the long-term lesson: language is relative and hairs can be split an infinite number of times.  You cannot take a language that is basically amorphous (on purpose) and apply it to the task of pinpoint accuracy.  The pin always points as well to areas of inaccuracy — the language.  Language is a tool of estimation, best suited to trial and error.  One advocate can always come up with a more technical argument than the other.  That works both ways, and in a vacuum, she who argues last should be able to jump on the more technical side of the fence.

But if there were no artificial stop, this fence hopping can go on ad infinitum.  But the process runs up smack dab into another process — the process requiring good order.  All statist-run processes are biased toward the status quo as the best of all possible orders.  Predetermined process artificially limits how many times each participant gets to jump the fence, so all arguments are truncated, statically.  Furthermore, the process must first make sure the process survives.  So, dynamically, we have a judge (or decision process) that sees to it that the fence jumping exercise always ends with an argument that preserves the status quo (eg. the statist process).

The process will bend over backwards and stand on its head to make sure the process survives.

The theme of the radio show was the rhetorical question of whether it is futile to pursue political corruption.  The answer to that question is probably “yes.”  But there is another process at play — market forces.  At some point, it will be too onerous, in terms of time, opportunity cost, and money, for the alleged corruption-mongers to seek shelter in the courts, and, it is to be hoped at least, that the large scale practice of corruption will wither.

— Kilgore Forelle

Save as PDFPrint

Written by