Taking Back Power from the Government
Bribing Cops, Suing Presidents, and Other Exciting Futures
In an abusive relationship, victims walk on eggshells. When an abuser enters the room, suddenly, victims become hyper-vigilant, aware of their every twitch and every movement.
A similar feeling happens when a cop car pulls up behind you on the freeway when you’re only 2mph over the speed limit. “Is my registration up to date? Is everyone wearing their seatbelt? Is 2mph okay? Should I move over?” Suddenly, law-abiding citizens are hypervigilant and supremely confident that they are probably breaking some law that will provoke punishment from the police officer.
I’m a wealthy white man, I can’t even imagine what other people in other rungs of society might feel in a similar situation.
Legalize Bribery
When I argue with police officers in my head, I often imagine I’d say something demeaning like, “I pay your salary!” But this common refrain feels indirect, almost a stretch because even though it’s true some tax money does end up in that cop’s pocket, I really don’t have any say or control over how much and when.
That’s why I think we should legalize bribery. It’s an easy and more direct way to shift the power dynamic a bit more to the common man.
Now, you might be thinking, “But Josh, this tips the scales even further into the hands of the wealthy since poor people can’t afford to bribe the police.” You’re not totally wrong, but you’re also kind of wrong. Bribery actually democratizes what is already legal for rich people—lobbying and Super PACs—so that the common man can bribe officials, too.
My family and I just got back from Southeast Asia where bribing a cop is no big deal. We didn’t have to do it, but multiple people said it was easy to get out of trouble if we needed to. Even though it’s counter to the Western system, paying off police officers for minor infractions is actually a far more equitable and efficient system than the bureaucratic nightmare we must endure after traffic tickets are issued. You pay the officer directly for the ticket and move on. No court dates, no bad record, no paperwork, no mess.
I’m thinking here of David Graebers amazing book The Utopia of Rules about the sacred, pervasive, and demonic presence of paperwork at all levels of society. The book opens up with him looking at a death certificate for his mother wondering what would happen if he just never filled it out—would she ever really be dead? “Police are bureaucrats with weapons,” he writes. “All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves.” I often feel shocked filling out complex legal documents for something simple like a car registration or health care form. I have a degree in English and edit books for a living, if the paperwork stumps me, how might someone uneducated who speaks English as a second language feel? The fact that bribery is illegal means that when someone in this position gets a citation from a police officer, the real punishment is that they have to enter into a bureaucratic hell hole for some time. They can of course pay the ticket, but that’s where we legalize bribery. Pay the $500 ticket, and it goes away, or in a more just world, pay the cop $50 directly and say sorry for the trouble.
I don’t know if it’s just that the police uniforms fit differently in Southeast Asia, but I was way less intimidated by the police there. Before you travel to any country full of brown people, some Americans will almost certainly warn you that “all their police officers are corrupt.” What we mean by corrupt in the West, of course, is that the power of the state is being subverted by private citizens managing resources themselves rather than with the government as an intermediary. That is, we think anything even tip-toeing towards anarchy is corruption. We are told that mutually beneficial human interactions are impossible without the government.
The fact that I could pay any cop in Southeast Asia a few bucks to get off my back alkalized what is usually a pretty acidic power differential. But in the US—the cops can rarely be bribed, that is, they can rarely accept money to make your life easier. Instead, they are the strong arm of a fascist government. They have a license to kill, they are armed to the teeth, there is no chance of paying them to leave you alone, they have middle school educations, and they usually are power hungry. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I can’t really mention the country I was in because I’m not allowed to critique the government. . . . so, there are tradeoffs. But the more I thought about it, I could kind of live without Freedom of Speech.
In Southeast Asia, being around police officers who were Buddhists and were setting up shrines and meditating every day was a completely different experience than being around gun-toting Republicans. It was so clear to me we live in a kleptocracy with a right-wing militant police force getting bipartisan support year after year.
What’s Extreme?
The word corrupt has a racist tinge to it, no? I rarely hear it applied to the US. Just like terrorist is only applied to political extremists that challenge American domination, corruption only applies to brown countries that don’t bow to the US.
Anyone who has any other ideas for how society might operate is immediately labeled an extremist of one kind or another.
American domination somehow marches on because it brands itself as having no extremists. Somehow, Americans are led to believe we rose to be a superpower without ever sacrificing our moral integrity. Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was taught to me in school as a technological feat, and the moral element was bunk because “nothing else would stop the Japanese.” The US government’s position was and continues to be: “It had to be done.” But if brown people dropped an atomic bomb on the US, it would be taught as a reprehensible terrorist attack in the history books.
More Presidents in Prison
Donald Trump is “making history” today as the first president to be charged in criminal court. There is an inclination to think, oh god, what is our country coming to? Things are falling apart? But what if they are coming together? What if Obama is next for assassinating a US Citizen? What if Bush and Cheney are next for lying to the American public about weapons of mass destruction?
It’s so apt that the first president in court would be for something idiotic like paying a sex worker to not talk about him. This is another instance where mutually beneficial transactions between citizens are considered illegal because they subvert our inaccurately named “justice” system. This court case is just the government saying, “Hey, give me a piece of that payment.” Again, David Graeber touches on this geniusly in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years. He points out that when poor people with literally 0 dollars in their accounts overdraft their banks, they are charged $35 that they don’t have. But, when banks send the whole economy into turmoil because they bet with trillions of dollars they didn’t actually have, the government doesn’t shut them down and empty their coffers to return to the people, instead, they charge them fines. This is another way of a mobster government saying, “Hey, if you want to commit crimes like this, you’ve got to give us a kickback. We. Want. In.”
So, even though it’s a joke of a trial—Trump did the fewest illegal things of any sitting or past president—it’s a step in the right direction. We need more presidents in court, more evening the playing field by legalizing bribes, and more pushing the government out of our business so that an equitable anarchy can flourish.
Free Palestine. Don’t lick boots. Imagine better futures.
Love you,
Josh