1. There is no way for a fairly normal person working a fairly normal job (probably service industry) to verify any of the blind trust stuff and past politician

1. There is no way for a fairly normal person working a fairly normal job (probably service industry) to verify any of the blind trust stuff and past politicians have helped make a mockery of the whole thing. To be fair, though, there are other ways. You can reform things so that there are minimum holding times for stocks alongside rules that make selling stocks take more time. If you need to hold onto the stocks for 6 weeks after you say you want to sell, you are going to have a harder time selling. You can also restrict times officials can sell. 2. Again, how is a normal person - say, a retail employee - ever going to find out about this? Even with public disclosure, all folks need to do to hide their doings is to make the language in the disclosure full of technical jargon instead of everyday language. 3. That's a bonus, not a feature. Maybe it'll encourage normal folks to take office more often - but of course, we'd have to do other changes to make that happen.