by: Rob Yates
“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.” – Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” – Lord John Dalberg-Acton in an 1887 letter to scholar and ecclesiastic Mandell Creighton
A recent Fox News poll found that government corruption is the number one concern among voters, with 88% of those surveyed listing it as something with which they are extremely concerned. Y’all have heard the Party bringing this up a lot since the poll came out. That’s because libertarians have been talking about the inevitability of this for centuries; it appears we are, once again (and unfortunately), being proven right, and at a massive scale.
The evidence is so blindingly obvious that it’s become accepted as a normal part of politics.
The federal sugar program restricts imports and props up domestic prices. The Government Accountability Office estimates it costs American consumers $2.5 to $3.5 billion a year and delivers $1.4 to $2.7 billion to domestic producers. Spread across 340 million people that comes to seven-ish dollars each, buried in the price of a candy bar. No one has ever hired a lobbyist to recover seven dollars. The growers have hired a great many — nearly $10 million on lobbying in 2014 and more than $5 million to congressional candidates. Set against billions every year, that is not a political expenditure. It is a purchase order.
The payoffs are personal, too, and legal. Billy Tauzin chaired House Energy and Commerce and helped write the 2003 Medicare drug law, ya’ know, the one that forbade Medicare from negotiating what it pays for drugs (this is NOT an endorsement of Medicare in any way, just an example of revolving-door corruption). The Center for Responsive Politics counted more than $200,000 in drug industry contributions to him over the previous fifteen years, nearly half of it arriving after he took the gavel. PhRMA began recruiting him in December 2003, the month the bill was signed. He left Congress at the end of 2004 and started there the day after his final term expired, at a reported $1 to $2 million. Tauzin denies any arrangement, not that he needed to be lying. Even if he had done exactly what he denies, he would have broken no law.
Tauzin is not an outlier, he’s the model employee. Public Citizen looked at members of the 115th Congress who left office and went to work outside government, and found nearly three in five landed at lobbying firms, consulting shops, trade associations, or business groups working to influence the government they had just left.
Since January 2025, Trump has granted clemency to a long line of officeholders convicted of corruption or fraud committed in office — a former congressman convicted of insider trading, a former governor convicted of corruption, a former city councilwoman convicted of fraud, and more. In fact, President Trump has pardoned at least 77 people convicted on fraud, corruption, or similar charges, many of whom (I’m sure, completely unrelated) made large donations to ol’ Donny boy. CBS News went through the files and calculated that crime victims lost at least $119 million in restitution as a result.
We know that government is inherently corrupt. I could write a volume of books continuing to provide examples at the federal, state, and local levels. The question here is the mechanism that drives that corruption. Does obtaining power lead an inexorable march to corrupt those who hold it, as famously stated by Lord Acton, or is power an irresistible enticement for the corruptible, as posited by Herbert?
The root cause is important. If Acton is right, the fix is structural, with things like ethics training, audits, disclosure rules, and better oversight of the people already in office. If Herbert is right, the problem happened before anyone was sworn in, and every reform aimed at the people in the chairs is aimed at the wrong end of the process; the only viable solution is to take away power.
Fifty years of research suggests Herbert was closer, but there is truth in both views, and this is a far scarier proposition.
Everyone who has taken a basic psychology class has heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment. In 1971, college student volunteers were randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners, the “guards” turned brutal, and the study was shut down on day six. The lesson generally taught in those intro to psych classes is that that situation made them cruel. The experiment has aged badly — later archival work found the guards were coached toward harshness, and it should be disregarded as evidence for much of anything.
Lost in any discussion about how meaningful the experiment results were is a bigger flaw. Random assignment determines how the volunteers participate, but not who participates. The people who walk through the door in response to an ad for a prison experiment are already a self-selected variable, and it gives some insight into the nature of government corruption.
In 2007 two psychologists, Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland, tested that. They ran a near-copy of the original advertisement in campus papers alongside an identical one with three words removed, “of prison life,” and gave personality tests to everyone who answered.
The people who answered the prison advertisement scored higher on aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, while scoring lower on empathy and altruism. The prospect of power attracted those who seem pre-determined to be corruptible.
Public office is a job posting. Underneath all the hyperbole about helping people, making positive change, and building a better future, it reads, “Wanted, someone who would like authority over other people’s lives and money.” Who answers that advertisement is reflected in the mountains of evidence of government corruption.
Subsequent studies have backed this up.
The economists Rema Hanna and Shing-Yi Wang demonstrated this with 669 final-year university students in India using a dice game. The students rolled the dice in private and reported their number on the honor system – higher numbers meant a larger payout. No individual lie could be proven, but a group reporting too many sixes was cheating, on average.
The students who cheated more were more likely to want government jobs.
This is not to say that being willing to cheat a dice game necessarily means someone has less moral fiber when it comes to corruption, but it certainly doesn’t suggest that person is more likely to resist temptation at the expense of the people s/he is meant to represent. Herbert was correct in observing that those with traits aligned with an inability to resist corruption are also those most likely to be attracted to power.
It turns out Acton was onto something, too, though. Psychologists have found repeatedly that power does not dissolve people’s ethics uniformly — it magnifies whatever was already there. In study after study, evidence has reaffirmed the notion that power inhibits self-control for those who already lack it, drives self-serving decisions despite the moral hazards, decreases morality while increasing rationalization around immoral behavior, and magnifies the morality of the person holding power – good or bad.
Positions of power attract those who most easily abandon moral principles, and then magnifies those impulses. Alone, neither of those factors bode well for hopes of an honest government for, by, and of the people. Put together, we have a feedback loop that screeches so loud it blows the speakers. If you want to know how corrupt a government will be, look at what the office has to sell. The system didn’t fail, it is working exactly as designed. As they say, it’s a feature, not a bug.
We have spent fifty years trying to fix this from the Acton end, and the pattern never changes. Congress capped contributions in 1974 and money moved into unlimited soft money. McCain-Feingold banned soft money in 2002 and money moved into 527 groups. McCain himself warned that year it would open the door to “a flood of unregulated soft money.” In 2010 the D.C. Circuit decided SpeechNow.org v. FEC and the super PAC was born. Money that preferred anonymity moved again, into nonprofits that disclose nothing. Four serious attempts, and each one changed the plumbing without addressing the water pressure.
We will never be able to screen the corruptible out of politics – the temptation is too great. We cannot train it out of them once they arrive – that would require complete psychological reprogramming. And regulating the money that buys the power and the people who wield it is laughable – half a century of trying has shown us that, where there is power to be bought, money finds a way.
What we can do is change what the job offers, and this is the core of the Libertarian platform.
Nobody lobbies a clerk with no discretion. Nobody buys a seat on a committee that cannot grant exemptions. Nobody wires $5 million to someone who lacks the power to return $2 billion. If we want to stop government corruption, we need to make it so that there is nothing there to buy.
Acton told us that power corrupts, and he wasn’t wrong, he was incomplete. Herbert finished the thought, telling us that power is a magnet to those who are easily corrupted. Psychology and history prove them both right, and make it clear that the only solution to the problem is to take so much power away from government that corruption is irrelevant.