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Comment by yetihehe | Hacker News Reader

Wealthy people are not corrupted, they are doing the corruption. As I said in other comment, not every wealthy man is a source of corruption. But poor people are not a source of corruption, because they don't have resources to corrupt officials. And poor officials are typically easier to corrupt. Again, probably way less than half of officials are corrupt.

> However it's much more convenient to paint wealthy people as the problem with the system then ascribe the problem to human nature as a whole or systemic problem.

Poor people don't have means to corrupt others, that's why corruption is typically coming from wealthy people.

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Sorry I completely disagree with your view. It doesn't stack against how I've seen the world work.

I think you are talking in very broad brushes with terms like wealthy and poor people. I will say that across the distribution of wealth corruption happens at all levels. I am not disagreeing that some wealthy people are corrupt but your notion that they are the only corrupt people is ridiculous.

It's more about power. Wealthy people have more power and their corruption causes more widespread effects. Plus, uncorrupted officials don't support corrupted subordinates, so high-level corruption breeds more low-level corruption, or as they say "The fish spoils from the head".

But corruption itself if used to become wealthy. Such a rich person will be corrupted and corrupt furthermore.

Positions of power will attract people who are willing to be corrupted. Is a very important motivator for politicians.

Being rich is the end result, not the starting point. The starting point is a poor society but with valuable points of power which are not privately owned.

Again it's not about wealth, it's about people and power. Wealth has power attributes to it and is many cases a proxy to power.

However many government officials have incredible amounts of power but little wealth. Look at any communist party officials over the history of time you will see incredibly levels of corruptions without any wealth AND they aren't doing corrupt work for other people, they are doing it for their own benefit (To refute your idea that some wealthy person is behind their corruption).

It depends on what you mean by "corrupt".

If "corrupt" means "willing to cheat", then obviously that is not limited to the rich. If "corrupt" means "willing to abuse power bestowed on them by society", then it is literally impossible for the poor and disenfranchised, whom society has given nothing, to be corrupt, because they cannot abuse what they do not have.

People of all social classes participate in corruption, and have to do so, to survive. It is only those who have power who can be said to be abusing power, and when we talk about corruption, we're generally talking not about all bad human behaviors, but more specifically about the corrosion of institutions and social trust that occurs when those in charge use their positions toward unjust ends.

> If "corrupt" means "willing to cheat"

Since when it doesn't?!

> If "corrupt" means "willing to abuse power bestowed on them by society"

You've just described any public administration: not rich (working on it thought) but corrupted to the bone.

Poor people can absolutely be corruptors:

Lets look at getting a driver's license in Brazil. It's widely known you can pay to pass your test, and driving instructors near ubiquitously act as middlemen. I know many people who have admitted to paying. They are not rich.

There are many stories I've heard over the years of minor corruptions like this. Paying off cops to ignore irregular documentation, paying off an official to get ahead in line ... this is absolutely beyond rich vs poor.

It is the rich who make these systems. The poor just live in them.

It's both rich and poor who corrupt such systems though.

And prisoners in concentration camps are responsible for their own famines. If only they would eat less.

How can you hold responsible people who have no economic freedom?

Everybody has the freedom to follow the rules or try to skirt around them.

> But poor people are not a source of corruption, because they don't have resources to corrupt officials

Any policeman in a third-world country taking a random 10 dollars equivalent on the street from a random street vendor would disagree. Just because that kind of corruption hardly is world-changing does not mean it doesn't happen - I'd even wager that most global corruption is small-scale, low-amount by relatively poor people towards relatively low-ranking officials.

Agree - and from statistics we know the long-end of the distribution tail (i.e. smaller impacts) in aggregate can have power. To be clear I am not disputing wealthy people can be corrupt I'm saying that it's widespread amongst humanity and not one group of individuals.

Good argument. I think such bottom-level corruption is caused by top-level corruption and general demoralisation of society. When you have low-level worker who is corrupted, but higher-levels are moral, you can just denounce that one worker. If higher levels are also corrupt, you have no one to appeal to, so corruption thrives. So, fixing corruption from top should be first, but then low-level corruption should be stamped out as soon as possible.

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