> I have started appreciating bribery and corruption as a necessary lubrication for any excessively bureaucratic system to work.

I feel similarly, when it comes to pork. We tried to eliminate that from congress, calling it wasteful and corrupting. And perhaps at some level that is accurate. But when we took it away, now all we have is naked ideology. It's not clear to me that this is an improvement, in fact I think it is the opposite.

Bring back the pork.

Transparency and politics can't mix. Zero sum deals where some group wins while another group loses are nearly impossible. Yet those are exactly the deals that need to be done. Example: America cannot agree where to store its nuclear waste.

https://ag.nv.gov/Hot_Topics/Issue/Yucca/

The so-called "pork" definitely gave everyone an incentive to compromise to a far greater degree.

Allowing bribery and corruption only ensures that whatever system you end up with requires bribery and corruption to work.

Better to let the system freeze up entirely and remove the unnecessary bureaucracy than monkey-patch the bad system with bribery.