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Comment by sam_goody | Hacker News Reader

I do not understand the authors issue with paying bribes. You want your factory, you are willing to pay lots of money for it, and the system works with bribes.

Fine, so be it. Pay the bribes and get to work.

I once lived in such a country*. The unfairness is built in, but if you have the money, you can get whatever you need relatively quickly.

If you are trying to save money, fine. But you are willing to go to court, which is even more expensive. And all that time wasted you could have been earning revenue. So instead, pay the bribes, start the company, get workers and build clout, and have the power to make change!

* Said country has made huge strides to combat this and become legit in the past 30 years, and that has made everyone more wealthy - even those employees that can no longer collect bribes.

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Paying bride is a criminal offense. Paying bride abroad is also a domestic criminal offense. I do not think encouraging criminal behavior is a great idea, especially when it is also unequivocally morally wrong.

> Paying bride is a criminal offense.

Cringe.

> Fine, so be it. Pay the bribes and get to work

Since most people think like that, things don't change and everybody is miserable. Cudos to the author for not accepting this rampant corruption.

> If you are trying to save money, fine

If that's really what you think the authors motivation is then you may have missed the point of the article.

The author doesn't get his permit stamped and obviously currently has no influence. He'll probably give up, and now the jobs he would have created and imports that would have become local production won't happen. It's not an obvious good vs bad situation here, a corrupt system that allows bribes is gross, but pretending you can just act like you are in a western country with rule of law is ignoring reality.

You got it upside down. Exactly because too many people think like that, this whole corrupt system works. Imagine the whole country refusing to pay bribes. They would disappear tomorrow.

This whole "but this single action won't change anything " attitude may feel rational, and even be (selfishly) rational, but the effect comes through the aggregate. Lots of people in society behaving like that, and you get emergent properties caused by the aggregate of those individual choices. A dangerous (and pretty selfish) path to go in societies.

If everyone who has a problem with the corrupt system opts out, the system will chug along fine. Most people don't care, obviously. The people who make a moral stand will just be poorer and less able to thrive. You are basically suggesting something a lot like being Amish, they refuse to participate and as result they are a cute little subculture that is slowly disappearing.

Ah right. And women still can't vote and Jim Crow laws are still in full swing. Because if somebody would take a stand it would be meaningless, right?

What is a strawman? Do you know?

So you're saying during Jim Crow people should have refused to build factories? I don't follow your point, laws which attack black people are very different from bureaucracies that require bribery to give you permits for your business. I mean both are bad, but they are very different, and Jim Crow is a thousand times worse, both because of it's basic nature and because it was the law of the land and enforced with the full power of the government (vs corruption, which is people sneaking around in violation of the law).

This is what you are doing: "So you think it's ok to just pay it when the police to give you a speeding ticket when you weren't speeding!? That means you are fine with the holocaust!"

At the end of the day you are only playing a game that someone else has made. It can be corrupt, terrible, whatever, but the fact is you can do nothing to stop it, so if you want to get anything done you need to play the game. Your little petty protest does not stop the game from being played, the people who made the game as it is just don't care about your opinions at all.

>"I do not understand the authors issue with paying bribes." Because... Its extremely unethical and facilitates corruption?

OK, accepted.

Like everything in life, there is always a trade off.

We have a see-saw. One side has indignation, encouraging corruption at the level of one bribe, cost. The other side has time, factory, jobs, and possibly more influence to change the system.

And from my experience, the people getting the bribe don't see it as unethical - it may even be their "salary". (Eg. Counselors don't get paid in many summer camps, they just get tips. Parents views the tips as extortion. Is it unethical to tip? No, but the whole system is corrupt and should be changed. /rant)

Assuming that system is built this way (so the risk of paying the bribe is nominal), and you have the resources to pay it, it is the cost of doing business. It is unfortunate, but I do not understand why the cost is not worth it.

This is an unfounded dichotomy. The implication that you cannot have an industrious society without a level of corruption is not supported by your argument (nor any I have heard of).

Equitable working conditions make working more appealing to a worker - and this is extended to the "fairness" of your workplace. Tips are not "the cost of doing business", they are similarly an expectation passed down from authority to the workers to extract their wages opportunistically. People being accustomed to it does not mean that the issue is resolved, because it still leaves the financial risk in the hands of the worker should the business' profitability shift. And so bribes are similarly unethical.

Moving on from the issue of bribes to the bribe receiver, they are also very obviously an imposition to the giver. Not further, they make the "true cost" of a transaction less clear to varying degrees, allowing a services cost to vary very highly compared to what the public might think it is.

There is no good argument for a bribe.

> The implication that you cannot have an industrious society without a level of corruption is not supported by your argument (nor any I have heard of).

I’m not exactly sure what you’re saying here, but corruption does exist everywhere. It’s just a question of how pervasive it is, how much it’s actually enshrined in law, etc. (E.g. campaign finance laws in the US essentially legalize corruption, which could perhaps be argued to be like decriminalizing drugs in order to better control them, although whether that’s the actual intent is debatable.)

The Corruption Perception Index and the Global Corruption Index might help get a sense of this. As is typical with such lists, the top performers (last corrupt) tend to be countries with smaller populations. With bigger populations, the risk and incidence of corruption increases.

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021 https://risk-indexes.com/global-corruption-index/

India Penal code, Section 171E.

Up to 1 year in prison. Do you wish to be exposed to this?

Sometimes people just stand up for what is right and expect officials to do their job?

Regarding the country you formerly lived in, what efforts would you say were most effective?

A minister of finance that took upon himself to break all the (huge) monopolies [the country had one phone company, one bus company, one electric provider, etc. These were broken apart one at a time.], to reform the corruption, etc.

He made plenty of enemies along the way, but somehow managed to keep on punching. And it truly is much better for everyone.

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