(December 10, 2019 at 7:57 am)notimportant1234 Wrote: At first I would agree, but thinking about the situation in Croatia or Romania, FlatAssembler may be referring to small corruption. Small corruption is what he described but without mentioning the 'tipping', a process in which you pay a police officer 10 bucks to forgive your speeding, or the public servant to rush your papers, or the ER doctor to move you up the waitting line, this kind of corruption.
Small corruption may seem harmless but it hits the poor hard, given that they don't have the financial power to partake as well as other social classes putting them into a clear disadvantage. Not related to small corruption, it is worth noting that U.S. corruption may be described as clientelism while Central and Est European corruption will be best described as a kleptocracy.
But he isn't describing that. He's talking about skirting the law or not enforcing the law. While both of these are illegal, they aren't - in and of themselves - corrupt practices.
Suppose a cop searches a car and finds an amount of weed that is just over the legal limit. If he tells the driver, 'Don't travel with this again. Go straight home, and try to be smarter', he hasn't enforced the law. If he pockets the weed and says, 'Give me $100 and we'll forget about this', that's corruption.
Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
