Is government corruption good for liberty?

Economics Political Theory
1

There was a time, not so very long ago, when I would have been disturbed by the type of government corruption represented by recent charges against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. In past years this story would have made me furious. This year, I must confess, I found myself cheering at times. I have come to hold the view that this type of corruption may actually be good for liberty. There are three reasons for this:

  1. It helps to undermine the legitimacy of the state in the minds of those it still holds some legitimacy.
  2. It helps to reinforce the idea that power corrupts and
  3. It allows a mechanism through which some of the more onerous laws can be circumvented or ignored.
2
  1. It channels suspicion about the institution of the state away from this towards suspicion about the people who make up the state. Obama supporters do not worry about the all-powerful Presidency or even about the dual-Presidency that Cheney made out of a barely significant office and that Biden will inherit.
  2. People already believe that power corrupts. They just believe, contra Celine’s laws, that N+1 powers can prevent the corruption that N powers are driven to.
  3. Even in the best of times, the state would be a regional monopolist of arbitration and taxation, economic interventions would relatively impoverish, democratic governance institutes functional privileges rather than abolishes privilege, anticapitalists would continually advocate toxic ideas, larger states would suffer more than smaller states from theoretical and empirical problems, proposed wars would mainly be of the state against the society, etc. If you personally argue these ideas better or more frequently in times of crisis, it is just desperation. Your enemies are also making use of the crisis.