Achieving Optimal Fines for Political Bribery: A Suggested Political Reform

Velma Montoya Thompson and Earl A Thompson

Public Choice, 1993, vol. 77, issue 4, 773-91

Abstract: Allowing appropriately high fines for political bribery would eliminate: (1) the large and allocatively arbitrary bribes paid to our most senior, retiring, politicians (2) the more moderate, but ubiquitous and still allocatively arbitrary bribes paid to less senior, but strategically successful, politicians, and (3) the permanent loss, through censure or expulsion, of some highly proficient, but strategically less successful, legislative representatives. Moreover, with fines appropriately set, the incentive theoretically describing the entire political system would be elevated from allocative arbitrariness to approximately Pareto optimal levels. However, to create legislatures generally willing to support these wholesale political-economic improvements, legally trained individuals must be exorcised from the legislatures. Copyright 1993 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1993
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