The "small government" conservatives really showed their true faces in 2025 and 2026. Anyone espousing these ideas will not be taken seriously by me going forward.
If you can't see the irony in that, that their warnings are twice as important if the pool of potential abusers if government power is twice as big, then nobody's really losing anything when you opt out of engaging these people.
Just because they're hypocrites does not make them wrong. Remember it was the GOP that passed the PATRIOT Act, and people were warning about that from the very beginning.
Though they've been arguing in bad faith on any number of topics (and have been for decades):
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/arguing-with-z...
It's almost worse in the USA because the corruption is only accessible to those in quasi-oligarchical roles. There's some point at which increased corruption actually becomes more egalitarian (though obviously, not as egalitarian as zero corruption).
In countries where the police and government officials can be bought for pocket change by the middle class, the masses have relatively more power vs the elite who control the central government.
That's a real-world difference that gives the middle class more freedom to start a business that is really only feasible for the wealthy in the US.
You’re comparing permitting processes. That’s orthogonal to corruption. You can set up a beach bar in most of America without a permit and without getting cited for months on end, too, and plenty of people do it. (The pot-brownie sellers in Dolores Park aren’t licensed.)
The main point of this thread that I found very poignant was the accessibility of corruption. In the USA, only the rich get to be corrupt.