Bribery
Bribery
How would you define bribery?
Bribery is payment for a specific judgment.
Here are three examples:
A coach pays a referee to favor his team.
A lobbyist pays a congressman to vote for a bill.
A criminal pays a police officer to overlook his crimes.
It is, of course, legitimate to pay someone to serve as a judge, but if the cause of a judge’s conclusions is the desire for a financial reward, rather than logic, then those conclusions are untrustworthy.
Is the concept in any way distorted or badly applied today because of altruism?
Yes.
A businessman might pay off an agent of the government in order to be permitted to transgress any of the following four kinds of restrictions:
Laws which are just.
Laws which are unjust, but clear and tolerable.
Laws which are clear but onerous.
Laws which are incoherent.
Obviously paying to violate a just law constitutes bribery, but it is also bribery to pay to violate a law simply because it is unjust. As long as it is concrete and not too destructive, one should adhere to it out of respect for the value of the rule of law.
There are areas and industries, however, where payoffs are a necessary and expected form of self-defense against regulations that are either ruinous or unintelligible. The concept of “bribery” has no meaning in these areas, because the process of judging whether a man has done the impossible, such as meet unreachable or undefined legal requirements, is illegitimate to begin with and therefore cannot be corrupted.
When the government regulates in such a way that bribery is required, then what is occurring is not bribery at all, but extortion.
The public, however, considers any attempt by business to circumvent any restriction placed upon it by government to be illegitimate, because it believes that government, being non-commercial, is selfless, and therefore objective, lawful, and just, while business, being profit-driven, is selfish, and therefore subjective, lawless, and unjust.
In this way, the lens of altruism makes extortion look like bribery.
Does the term apply only when law officials are involved, or does it apply to dealings between private citizens as well?
Bribery is a form of fraud and need not involve representatives of the law, as the example of the coach bribing the referee demonstrates. In that case, anyone who paid to see the game would have a right to compensation, and both the referee and the coach would be liable. (This is a philosophical statement, not legal advice.)
Why is lobbying not a form of bribery when direct payment for a political decision is?
Direct payment for a political decision is bribery because it makes payment the cause of the decision rather than an honest evaluation of whether, for instance, a proposed piece of legislation is the best way of protecting the rights to life, liberty, and happiness, which is supposed to be the standard in an American context.
On the other hand, there is no corruption in financially supporting a politician who votes in accordance with your views, so long as there is no understanding that he is doing so only because you are giving him money.
Of course, he might allow himself to be biased by the financial rewards you offer even if you never come to an arrangement with him, but if politicians could be deposed for inscrutable mental processes, anarchy would follow. When those processes have been demonstrably corrupted, however, as in the case of bribery, then removal and punishment are appropriate.
So, why not just outlaw financial contributions of any kind and avoid the possibility of bias altogether?
Because either the public controls who is in the government, largely by choosing which political campaigns to fund, or the government itself does, and when the state controls its own membership, tyranny is the result.
In any case, concerns about money corrupting politics are misplaced. Actual corruption is a minor issue. Most of what people call “corruption” is the result of collectivism, which, having no basis in reality, offers no coherent standard by which to make decisions, leaving politicians to be accused of corruption when they make them by whatever standards are left, their own financial interest being a sensible one to turn to.