- A population organizes itself around rules. It grants police powers to some of its members – and then those law‑enforcers use their privileges to cheat the system. Cliché has it that corruption is a cancer. The truth, though, is probably the other way around: corruption is the more general phenomenon, manifesting in one context as melanoma and in another as illicit reproduction – or police extortion.
But what if I were to tell you that it is not inevitable? That it can, to all intents and purposes, be eradicated from society? Would you believe me? And would you pay the price?
The Chief Economist of the World Bank had a clever game theory suggestion for reducing bribery: make it legal to give bribes, but not to demand them. I can't tell if anyone ever tried it.By making a few alterations to the composition of the justice system, corrupt societies could be made to transition to a state called ‘righteousness’.
Under the current law…the bribe giver and the bribe taker become partners in crime. It is in their joint interest to keep this fact hidden from the authorities and to be fugitives from the law, because, if caught, both expect to be punished. Under the kind of revised law that I am proposing here, once a bribe is given and the bribe giver collects whatever she is trying to acquire by giving the money, the interests of the bribe taker and bribe giver become completely orthogonal to each other. If caught, the bribe giver will go scot free and will be able to collect his bribe money back. The bribe taker, on the other hand, loses the booty of bribe and faces a hefty punishment.
If you think this sort of thing's interesting, check out the Zero Rupee Note. Warning: Wikipedia page is a little sub-par. It's an Indian anti-bribery campaign based off jolting the bribe-demander into realizing that someone's watching and remembering. I suppose it'd only work in low-tension situations, like a clerk at the DMV demanding something extra. Not so effective if the police were threatening to burn your house down. It still seems like an interesting idea to combat corruption, and is a tool that drives communities towards righteousness. It lets everyone get in on the campaign by being so easy to use, and lets anyone communicate disapproval to anyone else.