Corruption at all levels is far more "endemic" to large organizations than small ones. It's also less visible, because size correlates with a lack of transparency.
Don't agree. Corruption "at all levels" requires coordination and/or a common stance towards it. Finding that in an organization of 3 people is not always so hard; finding it in an organization of 30k people is almost impossible.
No it doesn’t. It only requires a small group to agree to be corrupt.
As the organization increases, you are more likely to find people who can band together to collude to corrupt some small corner of it. Number of corrupt candidates increases, number required does not.
Amazon only needs to lobby one federal legislature’s members and only need to battle one federal regulatory body. If all of the power were at the state levels, it would have to scale that up 50x.
There can be corruption at all levels without coordination.
Example: greed.
There is such a thing as unorganized corruption. Example, in lots of third world countries where their infrastructure and systems are so bad it breeds corruption. No need for a top down version of it.
But if the greed is not coordinated, it's not going to pull an organization in a unified direction.
Yes, I agree that you can see examples in some parts of the world and in some time periods (including today) where even uncoordinate corruption is very damaging to a society. But - and this is important given the context in which I started talking about this - it does not appear to be a pathway to regulatory capture nor the formation of giant corporations in the sense that was proposed up-thread, in which a powerful "federal" organization is used to enable such organizations to exist.
> But if the greed is not coordinated, it's not going to pull an organization in a unified direction.
Greed won't direct an organization in a unified direction, but that just exposes a vulnerability where an outside party can exploit the greed at an individual level to direct the organization in a unified direction of its choosing.
"Corruption "at all levels" requires coordination and/or a common stance towards it."
No such thing is required beyond the common stance of 'venal self-interest' regardless of organizational mandate. Without checks and balances (and penalties) you can get a loosely coupled "corruption" at all levels with little effort.
Even if we take this as true small, local governments are still large in aggregate and suffer the same problem. Fighting small town corruption is a trope for a reason. If anything decentralisation makes organisations less transparent (e.g. cell organisation for crime/spies/terrorists) because there is no common means to look into them.
British local government is notoriously corrupt and very few Brits pay much attention to it in comparison to national politics (partly because it’s not reported on in major news outlets). See for example Private Eye’s “rotten boroughs” column. So that would be one counterexample.
