on the mises store about Walter Block’s book Defending the Undefendable (which I think is probably one of the greatest books I have ever read) it says how “It is among the most famous of the great defenses of victimless crimes and controversial economic practices, from profiteering and gouging to bribery and blackmail”. Except that when I was reading it on the PDF downloaded from wikipedia, I couldn’t find anything about bribery.
My question is weather or not it is practical to legalize bribery and how would it work? Is it true that bribery has led to epidemic corruption in many countries, and if I am wrong, then how would bribery be beneficial to society? What are the benefits of bribery?
I believe the position is that there is nothing wrong with being a briber or attempting to bribe someone. But its likely that if someone is the recipient of a bribe, that they are breaking some other contract. I think a classic case could be of someone in charge of a company’s purchasing budget and some wholesaler pays the purchasing director a bribe so that the purchasing director would chose to purchase a whole bunch of products from the wholesaler. Either the purchasing director is not fulfilling his job properly and will soon be fired (if not for getting caught taking bribes, but for purchasing too much of a product that didn’t sell), or the wholesaler paid an unnecessary bribe (in that the purchasing director would have bought the products anyway).