More on the Law

My experience in Thailand of giving up a substantial portion of my liver for a few hours (more like a few days) in order to convince the local officials of the need to grant my 40 kids citizenship is an example of what I mean by getting around the law. It was not that extreme of a case. However, it was an example of working with the local power structures and what would seem to be problems with them in order to get the job done. Working with what you have must be the method of those who wish to see change as soon as possible in corrupt circumstances. I do not condone buying people out of slavery, as this does nothing to slow the demand and it only makes expanding the supply easier because of the cash infusion. Buying off corrupt officials on the other hand can not be overlooked. It is the case the the systemic issues of corruption need to be addressed, as these are contributing factors to people ending up in slavery to begin with. However, if the short term benefit exceeds the lose of propping up the corrupt system in just a small way, a way that it would probably be propped up in anyway even if you weren't there, buy him off. Buy the police off. Buy them all off and turn the system on itself.

The key to understanding the logic of how buying a corrupt official off is good and buying someone out of slavery is not is to understand the differing systemic impacts of the two actions. As I said, buying someone out of slavery won't make people stop wanting the service. Whoever you bought him or her from now has money to go out and buy more people, and where there was one person in slavery, there are many more at risk. On the other hand, buying off a corrupt official to actually do his or her job, which is to do something about the situation because slavery is illegal everywhere has only the negative side effect of reinforcing the notion on the part of the official that they can get bribed. I don't see this notion going away anytime soon.

This can take a number of forms. A police officer can be paid to give information about criminal organizations he or she has information on. An agricultural officer can get paid to give preferential treatment in terms of allocating seeds and market access to poorer groups in his community, which are at risk for exploitation. You can get drunk with local district officials to show them you don't judge and won't tell as long as they give out citizenship papers to the at-risk children you are taking care of. To be honest, in many cases this is actually fair. That is too say, because of the extremely low wages many public servants get in the developing world, this pay off constitutes their legitimate wage and a proper incentive not to take the same payoff from criminals.

Naturally though, this does not confront the underlying issues of corruption, which create the environment for criminals to take advantage of at risk groups. Whereas buying off people is a bottom up approach to dealing with the issue, a top down approach is needed to fully eliminate it. This takes time and money. Successful examples of corruption mitigation all have in common that the governments who carried them out had both of these. One such example is Singapore. Corruption here is almost 0, while all other Southeast Asian nations rank much, much worse. Singapore managed this through a two fold approach of enforcing extremely brutal punishments on corruption. You take a bribe, you don't die, but your public life is over and any hope of employment once your prison term is over is wasted, which is too bad because you will be fined more money than you will ever be able to make back. At the same time it has the highest salaries for government workers of any nation. Cabinet members have 7 figure incomes. The risks are too high and the incentives for actually doing a good job are too great. This is easy for Singapore though because it is extremely wealthy and it has had time to develop its system. This would be considerably harder for Laos, which until recently, got a considerable amount of revenue from charging international airlines for overflight privileges.

The only way to get from a system that makes its money by taxing plans for flying over or selling off its old growth forests to one that can pay 7 figure incomes to its officials is through a system wide approach, which utilizes the full spectrum of economic, social and political development methods in order to gain the resources that would allow it to do this. This tends to not be easy or nice. Korea went from being bombed out building to one of the ten leading economies in the world within a generation. A lot of bribes were exchanged and a lot of people were killed for protesting the strict control that was needed to get there. Japan went from loosing WWII to being the 2nd largest economy in the same amount of time and with many of the same problems, minus the killing. Something these tow did have in common and something that lends to the notion that this kind of transformation comes from more than just the county pulling it self up by its boot straps is the level of involvement from the outside world, specifically the US. Granted this was largely in the form of military aid and national defense, but this made possible the freeing up of a lot of time and resources to build nations that don't have that many indigenous slaves. Unfortunately, Japan and South Korea are major destinations for human trafficking victims from poorer counties. So is the US. No one would be if there were no poor counties. How to get from here to there is the challenge and the topic of discussion.