Chapter 17, Bribery
As in the case of blackmail, bribery has received a uniformly bad press, and it is generally assumed that bribery should be outlawed. But is this necessarily true?
Let us examine a typical bribe contract.
Suppose that Black wants to sell materials to the XYZ company.
In order to gain the sale, he pays a bribe to Green, the purchasing agent of the company.
It is difficult to see what Black has done which libertarian law should consider as illegal.
In fact, all he has done is to lower the price charged to the XYZ company by paying a rebate
to Green.
From Black's point of view, he would have been just as happy to charge a lower price
directly, though presumably he did not do so because the XYZ executives would still
not have purchased the materials from him.
But the inner workings of the XYZ company should scarcely be Black's responsibility.
As far as he is concerned, he simply lowered his price to the company and thereby gained
the contract.
The illicit action here is instead solely the behavior of Green, the taker of the bribe.
For Green's employment contract with his employers implicitly requires him to purchase materials
to the best of his ability in the interests of his company.
Instead he violated his contract with the XYZ company by not performing as their proper
agent.
For because of the bribe, he either bought from a firm, which he would not have dealt
with otherwise, or he paid a higher price than he need have by the amount of his rebate.
In either case, Green violated his contract and invaded the property rights of his employers.
In the case of bribes, therefore, there is nothing illegitimate about the briber, but
But there is much that is illegitimate about the bribee, the taker of the bribe.
Legally there should be a property right to pay a bribe, but not to take one.
It is only the taker of a bribe who should be prosecuted.
In contrast, liberals tend to hold the bribe-giver as somehow more reprehensible, as in some
way corrupting the taker.
In that way, they deny the free will and the responsibility of each individual for his own actions.
Let us now use our theory to analyze the problem of Paola, which repeatedly arises on radio
programs that play popular records.
In a typical Paola scandal, a record company bribes a disc jockey to play record A. Presumably,
the disc jockey would either not have played the record at all, or would have played record
A Fewer Times. Therefore, record A is being played at the expense of records B, C and
D, which would have been played more frequently if the disc jockey had evaluated the records
purely on the basis of his own and or the public's taste. Surely, in a moral sense,
the public is being betrayed in its trust in the disc jockey's sincerity. That trust
turns out to have been a foolish one.
But the public has no property rights in the radio program, and so they have no legal complaint
in the matter.
They received the program without cost.
The other record companies, the producers of records B, C and D, were also injured,
since their products were not played as frequently.
But they too have no property rights in the program, and they have no right to tell the
The Disc Jockey What to Play?
Was anyone's property rights aggressed against by the disc jockey's taking of a bribe?
Yes.
For as in the case of the bribed purchasing agent, the disc jockey violated his contractual
obligation to his employer, whether it be the station owner or the sponsor of the program,
to play those records which, in his view, will most suit the public.
Hence, the disc jockey violated the property of the station owner or sponsor.
Once again, it is the disc jockey who accepts Paola, who has done something criminal and
deserves to be prosecuted, but not the record company who paid the bribe.
Furthermore, if the record company had bribed the employer directly, whether the station
owner or the sponsor, then there would have been no violation of anyone's property right,
and therefore properly no question of illegality.
Of course, the public could easily feel cheated if the truth came out, and would then be likely
to change their listening custom to another station or sponsor.
But what about the case of plugola, where one sponsor pays for the program and another
company pays the producer of the program to plug its own product?
Again, the property right being violated is that of the sponsor, who pays for the time,
and is entitled therefore to have sole advertising rights on the program.
The violator of his property is not the maverick company that pays the bribe, but the producer
who violates his contract with the sponsor by accepting it.