Is California or Nigeria More Corrupt

you make the call

Because I’m reading Francis Fukuyama’s Part Two of the history of the world so far, Political Order and Political Decay, I’m sensitive to articles about political corruption, like “The Bullet Train Epitomizes Golden State Corruption,” by Edward Ring. California is spending $127 billion on their SF to LA bullet train, and the first 171 mile segment will be ready in 2030.

the California High-Speed Rail Authority boasts that the initial segment will reduce total vehicle miles traveled in California by 183 million miles

Only, of course,

Californians logged 340 billion vehicle miles traveled in 2022. High-speed rail by 2030 expects to reduce that total by 1/20th of one percent.

Don’t knock it! that’s 500 parts per million, right up with atmospheric CO2 concentration.

But really, how often do Californians want to get from SF to LA and back again? Once in a lifetime?

OK. So the whole point of the exercise is the grift: to contractors and union workers and transportation bureaucrats and I know not what. And that’s just the beginning in California.

Public Utilities: “If renewable electricity costs several times more than conventionally generated power—and it does and always will if you do honest cost accounting and factor out the punitive permitting costs—then utilities make more profit.”

Water: “the higher the price goes, the easier it is for big agricultural corporations to outlast and buy out small family farms.” And then there are hedge funds buying water rights.

Lumber: “California’s state legislature has regulated in-state timber harvesting to less than 25 percent of what it was as recently as the 1990s.” But hey, lots of fires for the firefighting industrial complex to fight.

Housing: “it is now impossible for private developers to make a profit building homes that working families can afford. Instead, a host of special interests, collecting countless billions in money from taxpayers, have created a massively subsidized industry in low-income housing and “permanent supportive housing” for the homeless.”

Yep, all this creates “permanent sources of profit and power for California’s public sector bureaucrats, its environmentalist pressure groups, its public utilities, its hedge funds and pension funds, its corporations, and its subsidized land developers.” In other words, Jobs for Educated Gentry. The ordinary middle class, not so much.

But how different is this from Nigeria, where Fukuyama writes about a German who married a Nigerian woman and set up a plant to process soybeans? It wasn’t easy to set up, because he needed to import machinery and the electricity supply wasn’t reliable.

Then the fun began. The local government wanted a kickback, because regulations. When the German complained to the police, the police chief wanted a cut. To keep out of jail he had to pay off the state governor, the police chief, the council chairman and a judge.

So the German went back to Germany and the 200 jobs he created evaporated.

You are right. This is completely different from the FBI SWAT team showing up at the house of a pro-life activist in the USA.

But the results are similar. If you are a small businessman in Nigeria, you give up and go back to Germany. If you are an ordinary middle-class person in California, you end up moving to a red state.

And by the way, we far-right conservatives tend to sneer at the flood of migrants heading to Europe and to the southern border of the US. But when you consider the corrupt and violent rulers they are fleeing, you start to understand.

Contra Fukuyama, I say that nothing has changed. Rulers have always shaken down the peasants — in their own best interest, of course — and they always will. As soon as the Industrial Revolution got started on its program of raising real per-capita income by 30 times, educated geniuses started coming up with narratives to insist that it was all a monstrous injustice and that politicians and activists should be empowered to put a stop to it. But something went horribly wrong, because in the end what happened was that educated geniuses learned how to grift, and so profited handsomely from the Industrial Revolution.

One fine day, we’ll see another Music Man show up in River City. This time he’ll tell us all that we don’t have to give away one-third of our hard-earned income to the grifters. Because, he’ll say, until you tell the politicians to put it where the sun don’t shine you’ll have Trouble, right here in River City, with a capital T.

And we’ll believe him, and we will change the world.

And nice liberal ladies that read The New York Times and listen to NPR will agree and will say to each other about grifting politicians of every stripe: “I can’t believe he did that.”