Political Corruption is a Symptom - The Disease is Political Power
Instapundit supports and regularly reports the current efforts to eliminate pork from Washington. Larry Lessig announced that he's going to focus his work on fighting corruption. But corruption isn't the problem. It is the symptom. The problem is political power.
Do you prefer the untouchable political commissar who'll send you directly to a death camp, or the shady official who'll look away if you pay him?
Surely, you'd prefer that your fate should not be in the hands of a political commissar, to begin with - that is, no political power. But if political power there is, you'll quickly prefer a corruptible official. In the meantime, you may dream of a political power held by the pure of heart. Maybe someone like Pol Pot, who was known for being untouchable by corruption. Or his role-model Robespierre whose very surname was l'Incorruptible. Both wanted to create a new man purified from the vices of the Ancien Régime through terror.
Political Corruption is the way that people avoid the One Evil on Earth: Political Power. Political Power is the power to be a nuisance to other people. It is held by held by politicians, bureaucrats, and private holders of government-granted monopolies (such as patents and copyrights, charters, government contracts, any kind of government sponsorship). Sometimes some freelancers try to exert political power on their neighbours: bandits, frauds, shysters, mobsters, racketeers, etc. Their power is not less political for being small-scale.
Political Corruption is when the politically weak pay the corruptible powerful so as to obtain a favor out of the arbitrary power of the powerful party. Lack of corruption is when the powerful party will impose its own will with no recourse to the dissenting powerless. Just like a fever is good, the sign of your body fighting some ailment, corruption is good, the sign of some productive people avoiding the full scale of oppression.
Government-granted monopolies, grants, subsidies, pork, etc., is not corruption. It is the spoils of political victory. It isn't the victims paying the master's goons to spare them - it is the masters distributing amongst each other the loot levied on the powerless, according to each one's political contribution to the victory. Futile laws against pork and corruption may change the structure by which victors are organized and thus the identity of the victors; they may institute an Establishment of bureaucrats and privilege holders over the arbitrary power of elected (or unelected) politicians; at worst, the purifiers will achieve to empower untouchable masters instead of corruptible ones. What they cannot possibly do is diminish spoliation by one cent of spoliation; they are just shuffling political power around.
Between the victim paying the victor and the victors distributing spoils amonst each other, there is plenty of room for shades and variants. Oftentimes, you are offered the choice between being more of a victim or becoming more a of victor. You give your political support and accept the authority of some political oversight, in exchange for which you are subsidized with money taken from yourself. If you are particularly active support, you may receive even more than you paid in taxes. Depending on how much influence you gather, you may be offered an opportunity to become an institutional parasite at a corresponding level of benefit - always under condition of compliance with the regime (although this condition itself is enforced in lax ways, with room for corruption and inefficacy, especially at the lower rungs of power - who cares if a particular non-worker on the dole really is grateful to the regime? All the victors care about is that each particular program has a positive general outcome in term of buying people's support with tax money). Or you may choose to remain a sucker, and not only get nothing and instead be taxed, regulated and oppressed whereas your rivals with less scruples will get on top of you. Your call. Who's the victim and who's the victor? The system is designed to make the difference blurry, to make it easier and appealing for people jump on board, and to punish the suckers who wholly refuse compromise. Is the corrupter being the victim of a racket, or being complicit in the exploitation of the honest? A bit of both - but you'll never know how much of each. No one will, and the frontier will get blurrier as political power extends its grip on society. And it doesn't matter. The heart of the problem is the political power that made corruption a good thing, relatively speaking.
The ultimate source of spoliation is the belief, which the anti-corruption crusaders share and propagate, that government does, can possibly and/or should work in the public interest, mysterious and nebulous notion with no objective definition. Truth is, whoever gets to issue the subjective definition of public interest that will be imposed by public force is, in fact, the tyrant. Hence all those big-hearted socialists, liberals or conservatives rivaling to define what public interest means. Change who it is, you've only changed the tyrant, you've not achieved liberty. To achieve liberty, you need to dispel the myth of benevolent political power.
Statism is the faith that all social problems find their solution in arbitrary political power (wielded by good people, i.e. just like me) and rigid bureaucratic rules (to protect the system from bad people trying to cheat). Anarchism is the knowledge that those who wield power are not better than other men but worse, for they are distinguished only by their taste for power, and their ruthlessness and lack of scruples in acquiring, exerting, maintaining and extending this power, whereas bureaucratic rules are applied in a way either inhuman or all too human.
Statithinkers emote, seek purity, and see money as an evil corrupting end. Dynathinkers reason, engineer structures, and know money is but the means of voluntary cooperation. As said Alex Tabarrok, We will never get the money out of politics until we get the politics out of money.
Links to meditate: Uses of Corruption by Theodore Dalrymple (Dalrymple dispenses moral insight backed by experience), and General Theory of Corruption by Mencius Moldbug (Unqualified Reservations is the greatest blog in theoretical sociopolitics - Cám ơn GNXP).