Debate: Is a government absent of corruption possible?
Side: yes

I am dying to read a example of justified corrupt behavior for a good cause.Nice call. My apologies. Good should have been in quotes ('good') so I could avoid having to discuss this side issue. But I'll deal with it since I screwed up and you're asking for the side issue.Well, everyone makes mistakes and governments and institutions are also capable of adopting bad policies and rules which have unforeseen consequences. To borrow a computer programming terminology, these unforeseen consequences are the bugs in the policies. Now, you may find yourself in a position where you feel very certain that the rules compel you to do things in a way which would be harmful to those you are responsible for. Even though a non-harmful approach exists and is available to you, the rule has been conceived in such a way that it is too restrictive and does not afford you that option. Here, it would be immoral to follow the rule but if you're a government official (or a doctor or a lawyer or whatever) it would be unethical to break the rule. Immoral because you're knowingly doing harm and unethical because you do not singly have the authority to determine whether the rule needs revising and what that revision should be. This leads to the perverse situation where doing a good thing would be corrupt (and here's the clincher...) even if your judgement was later found to be sound.Even with all the rhetoric of Obama's transparency, there are still back room deals.Interesting but actually irrelevant. It's not an example of 100% transparency. Also, even if it was an example of that, it would still be just a single example. Good evidence would be evidence showing situations of 100% transparency reliably failing to keep down corruption which I doubt are studies which have been conducted. I'm in the same boat. Good evidence for me would be studies showing situations of 100% transparency reliably succeeding in keeping corruption down. Okay, well maybe we can change our approach on this sub-issue. Do you think if 100% transparency where possible then that would ensure 0% corruption or do you think that 0% corruption is impossible even with 100% transparency?There is no system able of absolute transparency nor zero corruption.Correct. There is no such system right now. I already know that. It's like saying there is no way of landing on the moon when you're speaking before it's actually happened. What I'm asking is whether such a system is possible. I think this kind of question about the possibility of some kind of thing usually gets resolved by either an actual physical demonstration (like man landing on the moon) or by showing that the occurrence of such possibility would require two physically incompatible conditions to hold simultaneously. So you're generally going about it the right way by arguing that corruption is intrinsic to the concept of government (although you take a far bigger chunk than you need by arguing for humanity wide corruption). However, you'll easily concede that some systems are more corrupt and others are less corrupt. My question is of whether or not that lessening can go to zero and what is the justification for the answer.