Re: A few points for Lat...

"America is certainly not the source of all evil in the world, but you cannot reasonably deny that, as the most powerful nation in the world in both a military and economic sense, it has vast influence on every single nation in the world, and its government frequently bullies other nations into kowtowing to its will on any number of matters, from economic to cultural. That cannot of power cannot exist in any nation without a measurable level of corruption, and this should be logically expected."

In this article ⚠️ ↗ the author mentions a discussion he had with an economist about corruption and the scope of power:

"Some years ago, at a conference on international development, I suggested to the great economist Peter Bauer that pervasive corruption was one of the chief reasons that so many developing countries remained mired in poverty. Bauer sighed and leaned on the lectern and said something like: "No, that's not quite right. The United States and Britain when they were developing economically were as corrupt as many developing countries are today. The difference is that when the U.S. and Britain were developing, the size of their governments was small. The governments controlled a very small percentage of their GDPs. Today, the governments in most developing countries are very big relative to the size of their economies, often controlling more than half of their GDPs. Corruption is a problem, but the main problem is the size of their governments."