> Around here, it’s usually the government activities that lead to collusion, corruption, inefficiency and higher prices. The Kelo decision is a good example.
Government corruption does happen in NZ, but it tends to be small-time stuff by lone operators and usually not at a senior level.
The really mind-blowingly astonishing corruption is usually orchestrated and driven by the private sector here, and may also involve some hi-level governmental protection.
Probably the best known (and certainly not the only) example of this was the “Winebox Affair”, a conspiracy to defraud the revenues of Nations around the globe using fraudulent tax receipts from the Cook Islands, a NZ Protectorate.
Amazingly, tho’ the conspiracy was blown wide open, no convictions were ever entered — leaving little doubt of hi-level protection from somewhere.
How much money was ultimately defrauded is any man’s guess.
The really mind-blowingly astonishing corruption is usually orchestrated and driven by the private sector here, and may also involve some hi-level governmental protection. Which makes it government corruption, in my opinion.
The mind-blowing astonishing corruption around here can be seen in:
- Public schools - huge money, trivial results.
- Medicare/Medicaid - huge fraud, trivial amounts spent on fraud detection.
- Fanny/Freddy - the Government agencies involved in home mortgages - the administrators got millions while these pseudo-private organizations went bankrupt
- The Mortgage scam - The congress (and Bush) set up the drive to make sure everybody who could fog a mirror could get one or more house loans, and set up the mechanism for Fanny and Freddy to bundle those loans and sell them to Goldman Sachs, Lehmann and others who went bad.
- It was our fearless, feckless leaders who took a $trillion bucks to give away via TARP to undisclosed folks.
- It was our fearless, feckless leaders who want to spend a $trillion bucks on a stimulus program but also want to wait until the next election to spend most of it.
- Bernie Madoff made headlines in every paper in the country for a $20B scam. Yet Congress can build 20 separate billion dollar bridges to nowhere and not raise an eyebrow.
- Our government is handling billions to partisan political organizations such as ACORN, and nobody bats an eye. Yet if I give $2001 to a politician, it's a felony.
Nothing in the private sector comes close.
And that's true at the state level as well. Generally, only the scams with government protection get to be of much size at all.