Ray wrote
You've got to work with the system. The one that works, of course. Try and prevent it from steeking you and steek it when you get the chance.
All this righteous indignation is quite noble but jissis it's not going anywhere. Just in the last quarter of last year I decided one day on Olifantsfontein to ask a cop for his name and number so he pulls out his phone and dials a number and says is this who I want to talk to? so where to from there? And you hear about people trying to phone the anti-corruption numbers and listening to funny music and phones ringing.
But anyway, someone explain to me: if you can pay half or quarter of what you would normally pay for something, then what is the problem. It's called making a deal.
So you pay someone quite some money to take you through a few dress rehearsals of a driving test or you pay the tester somewhyat less to sort of give you a fair test and not fail you on some silly little things. Where is the logic of paying more for the same thing? I swear, I'm lost here.
THat's blurring the distinction between two different types of transaction. If I want to buy a Fender Telecaster and I walk into Music Connection and they say 9 grand, and I say four, and they say come on! you're killing me here, I can't go lower than 8, and I say 7, and they say 8, and I say 8 and you include a hard case and a set up and we shake on it then that's bargaining.
However, if I go for my driver's test, hit a pole during the reverse parking, go through a red robot and then ask the examiner how much it will cost to not have those little irrelevancies noted then that's not bargaining, that's corruption - or an attempt to corrupt.
It's not quite that clear cut though. If I'm a cricketer and I get told to run myself out before I get to 30 and here's ten grand then that's bribery and corruption. If I'm told to run myself out before I get to 30 or else I will get my daughter's ear in the post then that's extortion, and I am not the extorting party.
Now what if I do well on my test, have a clean round, so to speak, and now the examiner starts deciding that the fee that I've already paid (and which is my payment for the test and, if I pass, for the license) is not enough. I'd prefer to call that extortion rather than bargaining - the examiner is threatening to withhold something that is rightfully mine unless she/he gets a little something in cash.
There's a difference between bargaining on the one hand and bribery, extortion an corruption on the other, The difference is transparency. In my example of Music Connection I can haggle with the salesperson in the showroom, in full view and hearing of anybody who is walking past and there will be paperwork at the end of it. In the case of goings on at the testing ground there is no transparency - the deal will not be done openly.
We can accept Ray's position that's just the way that the de facto system is and so play it as well as you can. There are, for me, problems with that
Firstly, we actually do have a system. I like to to deal with ONE system where there rules are known and everybody sticks to them or else is ruled out of bounds. When I play game of soccer I want to know when the ball is out, when a player is off-side and so on. If I play cricket I want to know what constitutes a wide, what constitutes a no-ball and so on. I don't want to start playing and then find out that no-balls are determined by the size of the backhander given to an umpire or by asking the batsman or whatever. The rules - for games and for business - should be known and fixed when you go into the game.
The parallel rules are not fixed, not written down, and can change as expedience dictates. I can pay a cop to "lose" my speeding ticket, only to have him contact me a few days later to tell me that, can you believe it, that lost ticket can be found again and this time the price for losing it is much higher and before I say too much I should know that he has an other officer who was there at the time and will testify that I offered an inducement to them to rip the ticket up.
Once you have a "system" where anybody can make up rules as they see fit and without any oversight then you don't actually have a system, you have anarchy.
The trouble with parallel systems is that they are undemocratic and thus not transparent nor changeable in an democratic, transparent way. The way to get better laws is not to just ignore the laws or set up your own laws. The way to get better laws is via debate and iterative modification, so that we end up with a known, law that has been arrived through debate, through agitation and, yes, maybe some bargaining and compromise but in an open, legitimate forum.
