Thursday

March 12th, 2026

Insight

Doing Business

Mark Steyn

By Mark Steyn

Published January 12, 2026

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Today's hardest-working man in "public service" is Abukar Dahir Osman: it seems the President of the United Nations Security Council has his own Freelandesque side-gig with a "home health" business in Ohio.

To summarise:

*Chances of the US superpower doing effective (constitutional republic) nation-building in Somalia: zero per cent;

*Chances of basket-case Somalia doing effective (corrupt tribal bleephole) nation-building in Ohio, Minnesota, Your State Here: one hundred per cent.

[UPDATE! Just to clarify, not every taxpayer-enriched daycare is run by Somalis. Some are run by Ashli Babbitt's murderer.]

Historically, lack of corruption has been a largely north-western European phenomenon. It all gets a bit iffy if you go as far south as France, never mind Italy or Greece. That latitudinal distinction was more or less exported to the New World: in North America, a quarter-millennium of broadly peaceful democratic evolution; in South or "Latin" America, presidents-for-life, police chiefs with reflector shades, and opposition politicians accidentally falling out of aeroplanes.

Corruption isn't everything, of course: if one were to compare a small English - or even Swedish - market town today with its French or Italian equivalent, one would conclude that, aesthetically, scrupulous Anglo-Scandinavian standards of public integrity leave the landscape far more revoltingly scarred than the fast-track Mediterranean system of lubricating the process with a few lira in the pocket of the relevant bureaucrat. As my old colleague Theodore Dalrymple has observed:

The destruction of Britain's urban patrimony and its replacement by hideous modernist multi-story parking garages and office buildings, while inflating the GNP, represent a lowering of every Briton's quality of life... The Georgian spa city of Bath offers an even more startling example: in the 1950s, the city council wanted to raze it to the ground and replace it with something more in tune with the times.

They were not corrupt. They were merely insane.

Nevertheless, London successfully exported its lack of corruption to the British settler nations and (some of) its other dominions, and that North-West European distaste for state racketeering still holds, up to a point. The 2024 Corruption-Free Hit Parade:

1) Denmark
2) Finland
3) Singapore
4) New Zealand
5=) Luxembourg
5=) Norway
5=) Switzerland
8) Sweden
9) The Netherlands
10) Australia

America has never had Scandinavian standards of public integrity - see Tammany Hall et al. Yet, on the other hand, it was never down there with Somalia - which last year was the most corrupt country on earth but this year, humiliatingly, has had to cede the trophy to South Sudan, which as a sovereign state is only fourteen years old, so that's pretty impressive. Are they also in the daycare business?

The Democrat Party is not listed on the Global Corruption Hit Parade because they are not a sovereign state, although one gets the vague feeling that, if they were, they would be extremely competitive with South Sudan. The extraordinary wealth amassed by lifetime "public servants" on modest salaries such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi suggests that they would not be out of place in the cabinet in Mogadishu or Juba. East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, wrote Kipling. But East Africa is East Africa, and Midwest is Midwest, and for some reason the Democrats decided they should meet. To the Somali mind, there is simply no concept of corruption.

To which Tim Walz responds: Yeah, so what's your point?

Somalis gonna Somali, whether in Mogadishu or Maine.

So, in a vigorous competitive two-party system, how does the GOP react? The Republican governor of America's second-most Somalified state says it's just "the cost of doing business":

So "the cost of doing business" in a notoriously corrupt sector such as, er, keeping an eye on pre-kindergartners for a few hours each day is multi-billion-dollar fraud? So, when the capo di tutti capi flies in to Columbus from the Security Council meeting, he tells DeWine, "Nice little gubernatorial administration you got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it"?

With Republicans like this, who needs Somalis? Nudge it a few more years of "diversity" down the line: Will even Scandinavia's culture of public integrity survive mass Islamisation? Yeah, sure - just like Yorkshire policing did.

Much of the western world - France, UK, Canada - is in any objective sense broke, and, as I first remarked a sod-bollocking decade-and-a-half ago, America is the broke-brokey-brokiest nation in history: right now it has to pay back a smidgeonette shy of forty tril just to get back to having nothing, nada, zip in its pocket. Nobody has ever done that before.

But how much less broke would it be if it was not content to live with Mike DeWine levels of "doing business"?

I agree with Mr Musk that it's "probably much higher". Indeed, if you eliminated those on the take, whether of the Somali or Bill Kristol variety, you would be close to being able to cover the remaining expenditures through existing tax revenues. Imagine that!

But corruption on the DeWine scale is hard to reverse. "The cost of doing business" is that, as in Mexico or Ukraine or Joe Biden's beach house, you can buy everyone you might need to buy. And anyone minded to try rolling it back winds up in the cornerstone of the Tim Walz Quality Learing Tampon Dispensary. East is East, West is West, and that's where they meet.

As I keep saying, it's the people. If Danes run your daycares, you'll have no Early Learing Centers. If you outsource it to the Somalis, results may vary. This is not difficult, and it is a public policy choice to accept it as "the cost of doing business".

But in Minnesota the Early Learing goes on. Last year, you'll recall, a prominent Democrat politician was shot dead by some supposedly random crazy guy from the Governor's Workforce Development Board and the list of keynote speakers at the Minnesota Africans United conference. The perp left a missive for the FBI claiming Governor Jazz-Hands had instructed him to kill Amy Klobuchar so that he could take her place in the US Senate. The Minneapolis Star Tribune assured us this letter was rambling and incoherent.

On Monday Tim Walz announced he would not seek a third term as governor. The day before he had a meeting with Senator Klobuchar at which they supposedly agreed that she would get a clear run at the gubernatorial nomination to succeed him and, after victory, would appoint Jazz-Hands to succeed her in the Senate.

That's how you "do business" in America. No need for "rambling and incoherent" conspiracies.

Oh, bonus question. As mentioned above, the most corrupt nation on earth is presently South Sudan, and the second-most Somalia. So what's the third?

That would be - drumroll, please - Venezuela.

Mark's international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If you haven't read the book during its first seventeen years, well, you're missing a treat. It's still in print in hardback and paperback. (Buy it at a 77% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 47% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)

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