Finance Ministrations

Finance Ministry officials have been found to have been accepting what amount to kickbacks from taxi drivers.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080606p2a00m0na002000c.html

Not only are my taxes being wasted on 25,000 taxi rides home for these bureaucrats, I'm having to pay higher taxi fares partly because the cab company operating expenses have to cover cash and other gifts to these so-called public servants.

Years ago I used to spend quite a lot of after-working-hours time in various Japanese government offices, and I saw a lot of people collecting overtime pay while they read newspapers or practiced golf swings with their umbrellas, waiting for the boss and/or their colleagues to go home. Nobody wanted to be the first to leave the office, even if there wasn't really any urgent work to do. Perhaps the Finance Ministry people are different, but I doubt it very much, indeed.

Maybe we'd get a better class of bureaucrat if punishments for corruption were, for example, public whipping. Or execution. We'd probably have many fewer people entering the bureaucracy, but the ones who did would likely be a better, and more honest, class of people.