If you're going to have a ridiculous number of impossible laws, corruption is a good thing. Increasingly, what matters is not the number or even nature of laws on the books in the place you live, but the amount of actual control the state has over private individuals. Corruption subverts idiotic laws; it's the next best thing to abolishing them.
That’s from the legendary investor Doug Casey
Investing guru Doug Casey on the morality of selfishness and money
let me say one more thing about the issue of selfishness – the virtue of selfishness – and the vice of altruism. Ayn Rand might never forgive me for saying this, but if you take the two concepts – ethical self-interest and concern for others – to their logical conclusions, they actually are the same. It's in your selfish best interest to provide the maximum amount of value to the maximum number of people – that's how Apple became the giant company it is. Conversely, it is not altruistic to help other people. I want all the people around me to be strong and successful. It makes life better and easier for me if they're all doing well. So it's selfish, not altruistic, when I help them.
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The economics of war will eventually weigh on the US.
The following is an excerpt from a must read article by investing guru Doug Casey (bold emphasis mine)
An AK-47 costs less than $500 most places in the world; the bullets cost about 20 cents apiece, and the teenager to employ them costs nothing at all. In fact, teenagers in the Muslim world are in such oversupply that they can be said to have a negative cost.
A US soldier, by contrast, is immensely expensive. Even though most of them come from lower socio-economic levels, a substantial investment has been made in taking them even through Grade 12. Then comes the cost of recruiting, training, equipping, paying, insuring, housing and transporting them in the military. I’m not sure the cost of a US soldier in the field has ever been accurately computed, but it has to be well over a million dollars for a simple grunt and much more for a specialist. That’s not counting the lifetime of pension benefits and medical care for the maimed. And with battlefield medical as good as it now is, the ratio of seriously wounded to dead is much higher than ever before. You may sympathize with the US soldier, but he’s definitely on the wrong side of the equation.
An M-1 tank costs about $5 million a copy. It, or any other vehicle, can be destroyed by an IED fabricated from fertilizer or unexploded ordnance. Even if it’s not destroyed, or not even severely damaged, the brains of its occupants are likely to be scrambled by the blast wave. This is, incidentally, something that is underappreciated. A blast wave bounces a brain around in a skull like an egg inside a tin can. Considering that IEDs are both devastating and extremely hard to detect, it’s no wonder they’re so popular.
Have you ever wondered why there’s no reporting on the numbers of tanks, APCs, Humvees, helicopters and other (immensely expensive) hardware being destroyed in the current US wars? It’s classified, because the numbers would be so embarrassing. Unlike in Vietnam, there’s no longer any body count of the enemy because that would be politically incorrect. But it doesn’t matter how large it is; every dead jihadi is a dragon’s tooth that will grow back as ten replacements. That’s why there’s really no way to win a guerrilla war before you go bankrupt – no way short of genocide or at least serious mass murder.
A $1,000 RPG will easily destroy a million-dollar armored personnel carrier and its occupants. A $10,000 shoulder-launched missile can take out a $10 million helicopter or a $40 million F-16. It may be practically impossible to shoot down a $1 billion B-2 bomber, but that’s academic; they were built to fight a nuclear war against the USSR. They’re useless except to deliver atomic weapons, but the new enemy lives in refugee camps and scattered within teeming cities. The B-2’s codename should be changed from Spirit to Albatross, because it’s not only totally uneconomic, it’s almost totally useless.
So the economics of guerrillas attacking an invading superpower are excellent. In response, the economics of a superpower attacking guerrillas or terrorists are disastrous. In its current wars, the US winds up using cruise missiles, at around $1.5 million each, to blow up wedding parties. The direct expense is bad enough; the vastly greater indirect expense is the creation of a clan of new enemies. The best result is for the missile to just pulverize some sand. Even if it hits a few mujahidin, that’s placing an implied value of several hundred thousand dollars apiece on their heads.
In other words, whether we’re looking at offense or defense, the economics of destruction are tilted not just 10 to1, not just 100 to 1, but probably closer to 1,000 to 1 in the favor of insurgents.
Perhaps you’re thinking further advances in technology will tilt the equation back toward the US. But as I explained above, the effect of each innovation will be just the opposite after only a short period of technological monopoly. People have a lot of misplaced confidence in the so-called "defense" establishment to come up with marvelous devices to confound groups designated as the enemy. Of course advances will be made, at least for as long as the US government has scores of billions to spend on R&D annually – which it soon may not, for financial reasons. But even if it diverts funds from its myriad other projects, the procurement process is stultifyingly bureaucratic, slow and costly. It’s not at all entrepreneurial, which it still was to a degree even during WWII, when the P-51, the best fighter of the war, was taken from concept to production in nine months and turned out for $50,000 a copy.
The US will even lose the war for new weapons as time goes on, simply because the Defense Department bureaucracy is so counterproductive. It’s like the company Dilbert works for in the cartoon pitted against millions of independent entrepreneurs in the Open Source world. Dilbert’s company moves like a dinosaur, while the Open Source world watches, imitates, innovates and improves at warp speed.
Today a ponderous state supposedly represents our side (I italicize that because, although I truly dislike many of the people it’s fighting against, I consider it to be an even greater danger). At best, it resembles a dim, tired old Tyrannosaurus up against hundreds of smart young Velociraptors intent on eating it. The outcome is obvious: a bunch of the attackers will get killed, but the T-Rex is dead meat.
Remember that there are more scientists and engineers alive today than in all of human history before them, the vast majority from non-OECD countries. The ones who are any good don’t want to work in a constrained, bureaucratic environment with no financial upside. Entirely apart from that, if the minions of the perversely named Defense Department come up with a real super-weapon, in today’s world it’s easy to replicate and improve on, and for a fraction of the original cost. That’s why there are scores of thousands of apps developed for most any electronic device that hits the market today – in addition to the device itself being "knocked off" illegally by small factories that could be anywhere.
Terrorism icon Osama bin Laden’s goal was reportedly to bankrupt the US. And the US has been fighting a 20th century modeled war, when times (or warfare’s evolving dynamics) has been dramatically changing.
In line with the way incumbent political institutions have been structured, the US political establishment has been failing to keep with the new realities (or with the emergent forces of decentralization). And at worst, they seem to be falling right into bin Laden’s ‘war of attrition’ trap.
Yet you can profit from terror (or political folly) as Doug Casey points out, read the rest here
Investment guru Doug Casey in this conversation gives a trenchant insight of the mechanics of corruption
On his definition of corruption: (all bold highlights mine)
a betrayal of a trust for personal gain
On the difference between private and public corruption
One can find corruption within corporations, as when directors betray their duty to the shareholders for personal gain. Or churches, as when priests, for pleasure, betray the trust of the young people under their guidance. Even a parent can be corrupt, if he fritters away on high living money intended to be left to his kid. But those types of corruption stem from personal weakness and personal vices. They're horrible – but corruption in government is much worse.
Only government can impose its will on you by law, and back it up with a gun. And with other sources of corruption you can – theoretically at least – go to the government for redress. But when the government is corrupt, it's hard to get the state's right hand to cut off its left. Not only that, but government – partly because its essence is force – concentrates corruption, and incubates it. If a company or church is corrupt, one can quit them. But citizens are stuck with their government – and they'll probably keep paying taxes to it regardless of their feelings toward it. A discussion about corruption is necessarily a discussion about government as an institution.
On the roots of public corruption:
As Tacitus said in the second century A.D., "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." It's absolutely predictable that as all these governments around the world – and I mean all of them – respond to the ongoing crisis with an ever-accelerating onslaught of new laws, there will be more and more corruption – and frustration with that corruption.
Tacitus was right. But he could just as accurately have said, "The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state," because lots of laws engender lots of corruption. In other words, corruption isn't the problem. The state and its laws are the problem, to which corruption is an unsavory and unaesthetic – but necessary – solution. Laws create corruption, and corruption engenders laws.
Every time a legislature convenes, they pass more and more laws. That's all they do, all day long. So the body of laws and the accompanying volumes of administrative regulations and procedures to implement them is constantly growing – the whole world over. Legislatures are horrible and dangerous things that bring out the absolute worst in the people who inhabit them.
Laws and regulations are like barnacles on a ship. They keep growing and growing, weighing the ship down, slowing it down. If they aren't scraped off from time to time, they will threaten the ship's structural integrity.
On the efficacy of anti-corruption laws:
Those laws necessarily have the opposite effect of what's intended. By raising the stakes, they just raise the level of bribery required, resulting in even more severe corruption. Like everything governments do, it' not just the wrong thing to do, but the exact opposite of the right thing to do....
The only way to fight official corruption is to reduce the amount of legal control of officials, particularly their regulatory power over the economy. If there were no government regulators, inspectors, assessors, auditors, and so forth ad nauseam, there'd be no reason for businesses and consumers to bribe them to get the hell out of the way.
On how free markets are self regulated:
There are many market forces that regulate business activity – and more broadly, cultural forces that regulate interactions between people. In the marketplace, reputation is a very powerful force. So is competition. And so is liability – it's a powerful negative incentive. More broadly, culture is a very powerful regulatory force, which is to say, peer pressure, moral opprobrium, and social approbation restrain people from being naughty far more than fear of police does. And there are also private institutions that have powerful regulatory influences, such as churches, Rotary, Lions Clubs, and the like.
On the public’s wrong impression on the significance of government:
People somehow imagine that because government regulations are backed with the iron fist of the law, they work better, especially when the matter is considered vital. This is simply incorrect. It shows an ignorance of both history and of the state of the world today. Regulation usually becomes so corrupt that it ends up doing the opposite of its intended effect. A business that pays officials to look the other way can do even worse things than they would do if there were no officials, because the official seal of approval falsely tells the people that all is well. That's why the SEC should be called the "Swindler's Encouragement Commission" – because it lulls investors, especially the novices, into feeling they're protected.
On the roots of regulatory corruption:
Strict regulation leads naïve people to think, "Everything is under control." That has two important effects. One, it makes them irresponsible – a belief that they don't have to concern themselves. That general attitude then permeates the society. Two, regulation always creates distortions in the market. It's like a lid on a pressure cooker. Everything looks under control until the whole thing blows up.
That's what lies at the root of the concept of "black swan" type unexpected events. The black swan lands when the amount of corruption necessary to evade laws becomes as onerous as the laws themselves.
On why corruption is a good thing:
There's good news and bad news in this.
In itself, corruption is a bad thing – it shouldn't have to be necessary. As I touched on earlier, insofar as it's necessary, it's also a good thing. If we can't eliminate the laws that give rise to corruption, it's a good thing that it's possible to circumvent these laws. The worst of all situations is to have a mass of strict, stultifying, economically suicidal laws – and also have strict, effective enforcement of those laws. If a culture doesn't allow people to work around stupid laws, that culture's doom is further sealed with every stupid law passed – which is pretty much all of them.
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