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I think you can crack down on even the appearance of corruption without paying huge salaries. I don't see why not. The two concerns seem orthogonal to me. I

I think you can crack down on even the appearance of corruption without paying huge salaries. I don't see why not. The two concerns seem orthogonal to me. I think we should crack down on even the appearance of corruption in judges, prosecutors, FBI agents, etc. Does that mean we need to pay each of them so much that they are effectively unbribe-able? Finally, it seems very strange to answer clear-in-aggregate corruption by paying the corrupt more money. I worry that if we aren't able to stem the corruption now, then giving our wealthy and corrupt rulers more money won't really help.

solveit 5y ago
> I think you can crack down on even the appearance of corruption without paying huge salaries. Sure, go ahead. Less flippantly: Of course there's no law of physics forbidding it, but I believe the structural dynamics I described make this infeasible. I would be happy to see examples of societies that prove otherwise though. > Finally, it seems very strange to answer clear-in-aggregate corruption by paying the corrupt more money. Yes it is, which is why that's not really feasible either. Hence the catch-22.
542354234235 5y ago
>Does that mean we need to pay each of them so much that they are effectively unbribe-able? Why don’t we use the security clearance model? We don’t pay people that work in intelligence operations huge salaries, but we also don’t want them sell secrets to Russia. Any of them could be bribable. So we do extensive background checks and evaluate their finances, criminal record, foreign contacts, etc. for red flags. Then investigate, suspend, or revoke clearances based on any new red flags that come in. We could do a version of that for legislators. We won’t, but we could.