China/Kakistocracy update "D. L." <dlawbailey at netzero.net>
C. Boddhi,long time
Regarding your argument below, if the cause of corruption is command, and lack of capital market, why is there more corruption in capital market economies than in any other ? The ripoffs are legal in a market. ( See Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) Surely there is more corruption in the U.S. than in China today.
Peace,
CB
The command economy is inevitably corrupt and pre-capitalist in character. Inevitably corrupt because, under the command economy, resource distribution is simply a measure of political influence. It has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of economic programs. Corruption is necessary for people with economic ideas and insufficient political muscle to get resource distribution. The corrupt official thereby plays the same role as the capitalist or, more correctly, the merchantilist. Merchantilist because command economies have uniformly lacked a mechanism which would play the role of capital markets, allowing economic endeavors to be valued against one another dynamically and (more or less) objectively.