Strip democracy down to its bones and you will see the truth. Government is not service. It is business. Not the kind that creates value or builds wealth for the public but the kind that siphons resources, cloaked in procedure and ritual. The business of government is fraud, organized, legalized, and perpetuated through laws designed not to protect the people but to protect the rackets that bleed them dry.
Everywhere you look politicians and civil servants sit at the center of a machinery that monetizes problems. Poverty? Pass a law, allocate billions, funnel the contracts through friends, cronies, and NGOs built for the purpose. Climate change? A gold mine. Announce a program, commission research, issue regulations, then quietly cash in on the industries that spring up around it. Hunger, disasters, even fake science dressed up as urgent, each crisis is an opportunity. Each solution is a racket.
Let us stop pretending this is about bad apples. The rot is not incidental. It is structural. The rules are written to ensure fraud is not a side effect but the point. What makes it especially insidious is that it is all legal. As long as a law is passed the theft is sanctified. Legality becomes the shield. Democracy becomes the alibi. In reality what you have is theft made respectable.
The oldest democracies are the most refined at this. The United States and Western Europe have perfected the art of laundering corruption through a velvet process. Shift responsibility to independent NGOs and legally created monopolies. These bodies claim to operate for the public good but are deliberately designed to be unaccountable. They are untouchable, hidden behind the façade of expertise, and when things go wrong they simply point back to government who of course gave them the authority.
This is the revolving door. Civil servants and ministers move seamlessly into lucrative private roles after office, rewarded by the very corporations fattened by the laws they once wrote. A minister who regulates banks later takes a senior role at the same bank. A bureaucrat who designed a billion peso contract retires straight into a consultancy firm paid to implement it. The money trail is invisible because it is not hidden. It is legal. It is policy.
And the risks? Negligible. Only the fools or the careless get caught. For the rest the system protects them. The rewards are obscene, insider investments, sinecures, lifetime pensions, and when the public forgets, honors bestowed for their service. The opposition will not dismantle the system because the opposition is waiting for its turn at the trough. Why burn down the machine when you have built your career on learning how to operate it?
This is why genuine reformers never make it far. The system has antibodies for honesty. Those who ask too many questions remain backbenchers or local officials, never ministers. If they push harder they are deselected, quietly exiled, or bought off. If they expose the fraud outright they are threatened, bankrupted, or scapegoated for crimes they did not commit. Whistleblowers are not protected, they are destroyed. This is how governments inoculate themselves against accountability.
And the public? We are managed, not governed. We are told to vote, to have our say, while the same playbook runs regardless of who is in office. Parties trade places but the rackets remain. Every program, every budget, every reform is another way to monetize suffering. They tell us they are serving the people. What they are really serving is the endless banquet of elites, investors, lobbyists, and the civil service that oils the machine.
To call this corruption is too small. Corruption suggests someone breaking the rules. This is something darker. A system built to ensure the rules themselves protect theft. A democracy in name but a racket in practice. An empire of fraud disguised as law.
Look closely and you will see it everywhere. A disaster hits and overnight a flood of contracts enriches contractors and bureaucrats. A new welfare program is announced but most of the money evaporates into administration before reaching those in need. Budgets balloon year after year but schools crumble, hospitals falter, and farmers starve. And still the officials line up for photo ops, convinced they have done nothing wrong. Because by the letter of the law they have not.
This is why outrage rarely translates into reform. Because the real fight is not against corrupt individuals, it is against a government system designed to protect and reward them. Until we confront that truth, until we stop mistaking legality for morality, nothing changes. The business of government will remain what it has always been, fraud dressed up as service, a racket disguised as democracy.
And here is the most dangerous part. The system survives because we let it. We are trained to think that voting is enough, that accountability is built into the process, that the next election will fix what the last one broke. But elections are not justice. They are resets for the same machine. If the game is rigged, switching players will not change the outcome.
The truth is brutal, and it demands a brutal honesty in return. Government as we know it is not broken. It is functioning exactly as designed. To enrich the few. To pacify the many. And to do so under the banner of legitimacy. That is not service. That is not democracy. That is legalized crime.
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