Governments have long recognized the problem of corruption in government, both how eroding public trust undermines stability, and suboptimal public policy decisions made by corrupt officials. However, no one seems to have effectively solved the problem in thousands of years. Why is this problem so difficult?
The obvious solution is to monitor government officials to catch acts of corruption. Modern totalitarian states, often communist countries, have had powerful and extensive secret police to surveil the population, and it would be a simple matter to instruct the police to monitor the government. This has almost certainly been done. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to have worked; such states end up being horribly corrupt, unable to avoid the adage "absolute power corrupts absolutely", ultimately causing the government to fail, perhaps succumb to revolution.
Is the failure simply an implementation problem? Perhaps there still isn't the technology to truly effectively surveil powerful government officials intent on hiding acts of corruption. However, we would expect some surveillance, even if not perfect, to have had some effect.
Or is surveillance of the government somehow fundamentally flawed as a solution? Perhaps often the situation happens where no single individual does anything wrong, yet the government as a whole behaves in a corrupt manner. (Lessig's Institutional Corruption)
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