EUROPE’S DIRTY SECRET: Widespread governmental corruption at the highest levels, corruption that nobody’s willing to do anything about:

Political corruption is the disease that dares not speak its name. It has become so much a part of public life, in fact, that politicians of every stripe agree not to speak about it. “There’s this incomprehensible, scandalous silence,” says Arnaud Montebourg, a lonely critic in the French Parliament. The cost to taxpayers is incalculable. Corruption steals money from social programs and services. (Bribes, kickbacks and inflated pricing add 5 percent to 30 percent to the cost of public projects, according to various estimates.) It erodes public confidence in government and undermines the legitimacy of political parties and their leaders. Once it was hoped that a new generation of young leaders would emerge to challenge the old way of doing things, and along the way clean up public life. But in fact the problem is only getting worse. Public anger seems to be brewing, especially in Germany and France, where an increasingly disaffected electorate is turning apathetic and showing signs of abandoning the system.

Corruption happens anywhere, of course, but there’s reason to believe that the more the government does, and the more it strays from subjects that people have some ability to oversee (like road-building, police protection, etc.) the worse it gets.