Socialist and mixed economies encourage corruption

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This is not necessarily because the politicians running countries with mixed and socialist economies are inherently more dishonest than those running governments that take a more hands-off, laissez-faire approach. The reason large, centralised governments are more prone to bribery and corruption is because there is much more incentive for businessmen and other interested parties to try to influence government decisions. To take an imaginary example: Imagine Country A is a libertarian, capitalist paradise where people are free to own property and trade with each other, and the government has no power to seize property - it's simply there to protect people from crime etc. Country B, on the other hand, is a mixed economy where private businesses exist but the government has the power to intervene in various ways if it believes it's for the "greater good". In each country, the supermarket chain Greedy Moneygrubbers R Us wants to build a new supermarket in a location that's currently occupied by a housing estate. In Country A, the supermarket chain would have to negotiate with the home owners and try to persuade them to sell their property. No doubt they would have to offer a lot of money to do this, which would cut into their profits, but there's no other way to proceed. The government can't help them. In Country B, the supermarket chain can go to the government and request that they acquire the housing estate by way of a compulsory purchase order (Americans call this "eminent domain") and then turn it over to the supermarket chain to develop. The argument advanced would probably be that the good done by generating extra jobs in the area would outweigh the harm done by kicking people out of their homes. If that argument didn't work, the supermarket chain could very well be tempted to bribe the minister responsible - either directly or through the usual very large donation to the ruling party's funds. They wouldn't want to spend that money, but it would almost certainly be a lot cheaper than offering the home owners the market price for their houses. So in a laissez-faire capitalist economy, there's a lot less incentive to bribe the government, whereas in a command economy the temptation's always going to be there. I'm not saying a libertarian government would be completely free of corruption, because human nature's not perfect and there's always going to be some scope for dodgy dealings (military contracts etc), but there'd be a lot less than is typical at the moment. If you want less government corruption, you need less government.