The pendulum anaolgy is an excellent way of describing how politics in this country works. I've used it often over the past several weeks. One option would be

The pendulum anaolgy is an excellent way of describing how politics in this country works. I've used it often over the past several weeks. One option would be to limit how long someone can work for a lobbying organization (instead of how long must wait before lobbying after government service). What if we restored the importance of civic duty in our society? Top talent could be incentivized to work for the government for non financial reasons. I don't think anyone knows the answer to this problem (yet), but it is a large problem worth solving. Personally, I do feel strongly about civic duty. But after having (briefly) worked on government contracts I found an incredible amount of waste, cronyism and general ineptitude to turn me off. So I joined the software startup world instead ;).