At Stardate 20030701.1734, Jan Coffey wrote:
You don't think power corupts, and so you are not concerned as much about the system.
That's not what I said. I know that power corrupts, but over here we consider people in power to be "innocent until proven guilty", instead of "guilty until proven innocent".
Our "founding fathers" left europe at a time when it was mostly monarchies, and they set up this kind of government becouse of the very corupt power they experienced at the time.
Modern-day democratic government (in both Europe and the US) is very different from the feudal way in which Europe was run in the 15th century. I can imagine that corruption was much more commonplace then than it is now; back then there were no checks and balances, and the population was mostly uneducated and illiterate (and way to busy trying to stay alive, to worry about politics).
OUr feeling on Europe is that we dig more, so we find more.
Of all those millions of politicians that have served your country over the centuries, how many of them have actually been proven to be corrupt or have been proven to have otherwise abused their powers?
> So far, most of our elected officials haven't betrayed that trust. Our > politicians know that any abuse of power is likely to be discovered sooner > or later, and that this discovery will put a quick end to their political > career. Few are willing to risk their position of influence, their > reputation and their quite pleasant paychecks.
If you were a little more catious and dug deeper, and trusted a bit less, we think you would find that you are missing a lot of abuse.
Maybe, maybe not. We're keeping a pretty close eye on our politicians, I don't think many of them will be able to abuse their power without anyone noticing it. Nevertheless, we're not going to say that many of our politicians are corrupt; we still adhere to the principle of "innocent until proven guilty".
Jeroen van Baardwijk
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