The quest for Big, Clean Government is utterly futile, and most people who promise it know it's impossible. Corruption is written into the DNA of Big Government, including authoritarian and totalitarian systems. Only small governments can be clean, and even then it's tough.
One of the biggest lies of authoritarianism is that it can provide Big, Clean Government at last. Authoritarians often gain power by criticizing the corruption of democratic Big Government and blaming it all on the private sector. Honest government requires less freedom!
Authoritarians promise that if government becomes a stern religion, and working for the State becomes an act of religious devotion, then corruption will be vanquished at last. Only a selfless overclass of born-and-bred bureaucrats can properly serve the people.
But corruption does not flow from the private sector. It flows from the nature of the mega-State. Corruption is woven right into the fabric of Big Government, because it feeds upon two things: power and discretion.
In order to have widespread corruption, State officials need two things: vast power derived from a massive body of incomprehensible law that controls almost everything in society... and the discretion to NOT enforce those laws, as the officials see fit.
Once those conditions are in place, corruption flows like a mighty river, unstoppable and eventually beyond criticism, once statists use their own corruption as an excuse to impose authoritarian controls on the public. You will never find power and discretion without corruption.
Stated simply, corruption is inevitable once powerful interests find it worthwhile to purchase special exemptions from the law, and those exemptions are INEVITABLY for sale. Of course, those purchases will be portrayed as virtuous acts of "leadership" and "partnership."
When government is small, laws are simple, and that light burden of law is applied fairly evenly to everyone, there are few opportunities for corruption, and it tends to stick out as an obvious crime when it occurs. Higher standards can be held for a smaller corps of officials.
Under Big Gov, corruption is so endemic it becomes invisible. People just roll their eyes in weary resignation when they hear about it. Of COURSE the powerful and well-connected get special privileges. Of COURSE we have government-subsidized billionaires.
And it always begins with that combination of power and discretion, with a vast body of laws that are imposed at the whim of officials whose indulgence is for sale. Corruption will always be sanctified as smart "investments" or the pursuit of "social justice."
What Big Government is really all about is taking the power of discretion away from the people, concentrating it in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians - who will invariably sell their discretion as a priceless resource, once they have a monopoly on it. /end
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