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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

At least for Germany... we're not overtly corrupt: you don't need to bribe policemen to get out of fake charges or traffic stops, you don't need to bribe city officials for building permits.

But at the large scale, we are absolutely a corrupt nation: our former Chancellor Schröder sold us out to Russia, there have been dozens of millions euros worth of (shockingly ruled legal) corruption during the pandemic, the large companies ("Deutschland AG") have an extremely cozy relationship with almost all parties in Germany, not to mention corporate donations and sponsorship of party gatherings (except far-right AfD whom no one serious wants to donate money to and far-left Linke who refuse to take corporate donations out of principle).

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True, for building permits, either fast or out of the usual and other edge cases, you don't need to bribe people, you need to know the people in charge very well.

EDIT: Nobody wants to donate overtly to the AfD, that's why they had already multiple investigations into their finances and donations. A large part of which came from Switzerland. They do have those donation scandals in common with the CDU and CSU, those received anonymous donations in cash in briefcases. And Schäuble, who ended up as Finance Minister in the federal government later, got away with, I kid you not, "I do not remember that briefcase containing 100,000 bucks" (emphasize from me). So, it seems all parties in Germany are corrupt, some more than others, with the exact degree of corruption directly proportional to the time in actual power.

Another classic is regulatory capture.

Oh that new building code or electrical code just so happens to only be fulfilled by using the latest (patented) product by company X?

Well it's the state of the art, we can't build below that standard anymore.

Or union labor. I needed some electrical work on a new house, but there's no electricians available for months. Hanging out with a contractor friend, I mentioned that the state law says "the homeowner OR a licensed electrician", and he reacted like doing it myself meant wiring the house with dead orphans or something. I've done electrical work, I just make more money in software so I'm not licensed, but that is somehow even worse because I'm depriving the union electricians of work. So now its a secret I take to my grave apparently.

The rule does make sense from a public safety point, because untrained people can do a lot of mistakes in electrical wiring. If you as the homeowner fuck it up and cause a fire, well that's on your own fault. If a licensed electrician fucks it up, their insurance pays for damages. If Joe Random fucks up their neighbor's electrical wiring, chances are high he has no insurance and now the homeowner is stuck with a burnt-down house.

You wrote: <<the large companies ... have an extremely cozy relationship with almost all parties in Germany>>

This is true in most highly industrialised countries. Can you name any where this is not true? I don't know any.

Another way to think about it: What is the polar opposite? "the large companies ... extremely unhealthy / combative relationship with almost all [political] parties". That sounds like the bad old days in 1980s India. Most economies would be a wreck if that were true.

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