I don’t know what it says about human nature, but systems and corruption have gone hand in hand for the vast majority of human history. There will always be people out to get an unfair advantage over others, trying to gain things that they haven’t earned. I don’t expect this to magically change just because a society switches to Technosocialism. The more rules are set down, the more likely it becomes that there will be those who make their entire living from finding ways to skirt them. For this reason, I don’t think that there should be defined rules about what is and is not corruption. It is the spirit of the law that needs to be enforced, and setting out the letter of that law only adds loopholes that can be exploited. However, the spirit of the basic categories of corruption do need to be identified before they can be enforced. With that in mind, I present the following list of types of corruption that need to be discouraged in a technosocialist society:
1. Marketing. I might as well start with the one most likely to get people mad at me. Marketing is not considered a form of corruption in our current society, and is in fact one of the few major industries still left in our economy. But what is marketing? It is an attempt to influence the purchasing decisions of consumers. To buy something which they otherwise might not have bought, or might have bought from a different company. In other words, to skew the market in favor of a product which is unable to suceed on its own. Even if it might not initially seem so, this is a form of corruption. It is taking a system that is supposed to be based on quality and price, namely the market, and altering the way it works through the use of money and power, namely the marketing budget of a large corporation. For a free market to operate properly, it needs to be based on quality and price, and be free of these sorts of influences. To that end, any attempt to artificially increase demand for a product through marketing and similar methods for personal gain should be considered corruption and therefore a crime.
2. Unregistered Trading. As discussed in the essay on Competition, for the Market to work properly as an efficient exchange, all of the goods of the society need to flow through it. Not only does trade outside of the Market make it more difficult for the Market to guage supply and demand, transactions outside of the Market may be used for more traditional corruption. People are of course welcome to exchange gifts, but these should still be registered through the item tracking system to prevent the formation of a black market, to discourage money laundering, and to prevent “gifts” being used to corrupt individuals involved in decisionmaking processes.
3. Distortion of decisionmaking processes through gifts or influence. This applies to any attempt to influence people selected for a particular decisionmaking body such as a jury or approval board through the use of gifts, promises, or threats. This would be difficult to pull off in any case, as such decisionmakers would be kept annonymous throughout the process, but it is a clear case of “old school” corruption that would clearly be illegal.
4. Distortion of the democratic process through gifts or influence. This includes cases where a decision is left to the general public and gifts or other influences are used to gain supporters to a cause or to convince others to rally supporters. As with number three, this is a type of corruption that fits more comfortably into our current definition of the term.
5. Deliberate spreading of falsehoods to influence a decision. This is perhaps the trickiest category, because it comes right up to the line protecting free speech. I want to be clear that this does not include any type of opinion, or any statement whose truth is debatable. This is only for very clear cases of lying to advance a political agenda. For an example of what I mean, let me describe an ad that ran in a recent political election in Washington state. It was in support of a measure to ban same-sex marriage in the state, and it quoted a number of statistics about the country of Scandinavia. Apparently Scandinavia legalized same-sex marriage in 2004, and since then suicide rates have doubled and drug use has increased by nineteen times. This was all stated as fact. The problem is that there is no such country as Scandinavia. Scandinavia is a region. And none of the countries in Scandinavia legalized same-sex marriage in 2004, let alone experienced any of the drastic consequences the ad claimed. This was not a case of a controversial opinion that should be protected by free speech principles. This was deliberate lying to confuse the public into accepting their point of view. While accusations of corruption by falsehood should be very few and far between, it needs to be there in cases such as these.
As for the actual trying of corruption cases, there must be two separate juries. The job of the first would be to determine whether the alleged actions would constitute corruption, and the second would determine whether the defendent actually took the actions in question. The decisions of both of these juries can be appealed as described in the chapter on law enforcement.