"Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That’s Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win." — *Danny Dalton explaining his role in the Connex and Killeen merger to Bennett Holiday.
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Here’s how I break it down:
"Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That’s Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize." When it government passes industry regulations, it’s the government that’s being corrupt because it’s perverting the free market system.
"We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it." My guess is that the anti-corruption laws provide plausible deniability, e.g.: “Of course, Your Honor, we didn’t bribe the foreign official, because even if we wanted to, it’s against the law. If you have proof and want to present evidence, go ahead, but until then, we’re presumed to be innocent of any wrong doing.”
"Corruption is our protection." This is the sentence I don’t understand. Assuming my interpretation of the other segments is correct, why is corruption or protection? Wouldn’t the laws against it be our protection against being accused of corruption?
"Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win." If it weren’t for people making deals that circumvent the “corrupt” government regulations, productivity would stagnate.
If my interpretation of the four parts is correct, the monologue could be summarized as such: “(1) Government regulations create inefficiencies in the marketplace. (2) However, a charge of violating the law requires a burden of proof, and therefore, one is legally assumed to have acted lawfully. (3) It is this paradox that shields business. (4) As a result, society’s quality of life continues to improve.”
I don’t think you can really view it as a logical argument, but more of a series of assertions. Some of which make more sense than others, as you’ve noticed.
When I first heard it, it reminded me of another speech in another movie that had the same cadence… possibly JFK?
I think the problem is he’s intentionally conflating two kinds of supposed corruption to support a weak argument- the fake corruption of government regulations and the real corruption of his company.
You’ve pretty much got it. Basically it’s a (weak) justification for the corporate corruption. “The whole system’s corrupt, so we’ve got to be corrupt, too.”
Close, but I would go a bit further. Not only does it provide plausible deniability, but actual legal cover. The laws are intentionally weak so that they’re easily ignored, but that they exist at all helps ensure that 1) legal actions wouldn’t come under some other probably stronger statute and 2) that stronger laws are less likely to be enacted since one can argue we just need better enforcement of the weak law. It’s not stated, but to me it also means the companies the law affects actually had a hand in making the weak laws in the first place, probably by paying off politicians, i.e. corruption.
Basically I see it as him saying that (real) corruption is necessary to protect the company from the (fake) corruption of the government. You could plausibly say he has some kind of (ill-conceived) point until he says…
This is where he goes off the edge. Now he’s justifying corruption to protect their business so they don’t have to “fight over scraps” like free market companies do (a bit hypocritical given point 1). At best you can say that since he’s justified corruption as an essential part of the system, they have to be good at it to compete in the corrupt market.
Yes, it’s all rather weak, but it’s enough to justify being a corrupt, greedy bastard to some and he’s obviously sold himself on it rather well.
I bet you’re thinking of another Oliver Stone movie, Wall Street. I noticed the similarity as well. It’s Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko, the “greed is good” speech. I wondered if it was an intentional homage.
I thought that he was saying that corruption, as it is termed today, is the natural state of capitalism, and that capitalism is why we’re not fighting over scraps in the street, literally. I think he feels that practices the regulators call corrupt, he calls a necessary organization of business interests that harms fewer people than the government’s regulations.
You also have to bear in mind that the character is going on this rant after finding out that he’s been sandbagged. He had been using corruption to enrich himself and to further the government’s policies, and felt that he was acting in the best interests of America (by beating the Chinese to the development rights to a huge oil and natural gas field), and his employer. For this, he was indicted by the US governement, based on evidence provided by his employer. So he may not be exactly coherent at the time you see him.
I’m not analyzing the details of the speech here, and I don’t recall the exact context in the movie, but when I saw it I thought it had to do with us keeping the oil from the Chinese and others. The idea being that we cheat and do bad things to get the oil, because our prosperous American lifestyle depends on it. If it was distributed equitably, we would be pulled down to a poor world average. “We win” against the other nations. Was I wrong?
My take on the speech when i saw the film was that we establish laws that give everyone the appearance of playing fair, but that corruption of these laws–cheating the assumed rules of the game–is why we (Americans) win.
If market participants agreed to and followed the same set of laws, we take the chance that we could be indisputably beaten. But though we may be able to win in a lawless market, there’s no incentive for others to participate, and so our “victory” is hollow or valueless. This, laws are put in place to ensure other nations participate in the market, but secret corruption of these laws ensures that we rig the game to win.
The argument is faulty because (1) it assumes markets are a zero-sum game, i.e. for every dollar I make someone loses a dollar, which is not at all how wealth accumulates (at least in large-scale enterprises such as international business), and (2) corruption allows you to win only if you prevent others competitors from mimicking it, so the defense is not of corruption in general but of my particular corrupt acts, which makes it self-serving and opportunist.
He might be talking about ‘regulatory capture’ - the process by which regulations which are passed ostensibly to ‘protect the people from capitalism’ eventually get subverted by the industries that are being regulated and turned into a tool to protect the industries from the people.
What happens is that activists work to have these laws enacted. Once they are, the activists go away and stop paying attention. But the regulated industries deal with these regulations daily, so they begin to lobby for small changes that benefit them and hurt their competitors. On the international stage, trade tariffs are a good example. Another example would be regulations that put up barriers to entry in a market, which benefits the status quo.
But that speech is so incoherently written that it’s hard to tell what the point of it really is.
