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Every single one of these scoundrels will stand up at a college graduation and exhort the virtues of public service and sacrifice for country. But somehow they

by trentnix 11mo ago

Every single one of these scoundrels will stand up at a college graduation and exhort the virtues of public service and sacrifice for country. But somehow they all manage to get rich in the midst of their own service and sacrifice. They shouldn't be allowed to trade stocks. When you do so, corruption is inevitable. It should be an expected price of public service that you remove yourself from most other ambitions. I'd hope that if they were required to live off of their (rapidly depreciating) savings and income, like most Americans, they might consider some of their legislative choices differently.

Aurornis 11mo ago
> It should be an expected price of public service that you remove yourself from most other ambitions. Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs. If you make part of the job requirements that you sacrifice your retirement and financial well being for the good of the country you’re just targeting a type of politician you wish existed, not real people. > I'd hope that if they were required to live off of their (rapidly depreciating) savings and income The problem with your line of thinking is that “they” is not a fixed set of candidates. If you forced them to have “rapidly depreciating” financial states to take the job, you’d lose a lot of candidates. I know you’d like to imagine they’d be replaced by perfect utopian candidates who only have your best interests in mind, but in reality if you make people financially desperate they’re actually more likely to look for ways to commit fraud for self-benefit. Imagine the desperate lawmaker watching their family’s retirement “rapidly depreciate” who gets a visit from a lobbyist who can get their kid a sweet $200K/yr do-nothing job if they can just slip a little amendment into a law. The populist movement to punish lawmakers is self-defeating.
- ekianjo 11mo ago
  > Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well So insider trading is not a thing among Singapore's ruling class?
  - toephu2 11mo ago
    Singapore pays its public officials high salaries primarily to ensure the integrity and quality of its government. The official justification centers on attracting top talent who could otherwise command high incomes in the private sector, thereby establishing a "clean wage" that reduces the financial incentive for corruption. Salaries are explicitly benchmarked to the median income of the nation's highest earners. e.g., Singapore PM annual salary: ~$1.63 million USD Singapore President salary: ~$1.14 million USD
    - danny_codes 11mo ago
      This makes so much sense to me. If the public sector is compensated the same or slightly better than the public, then naturally we’d attract the best people to the public sector. Personally I never considered a career in the public sector mostly because there is an expectation in my country (US) that I would be poorly compensated.
    - throwaway2037 11mo ago
      To be clear, the Sing president has essentially no power -- it is a figurehead, mostly. It is a parliamentary system.
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago
  Compare the observation that in superhero comics, wealthy villains can be self-made, while wealthy heroes invariably get that way through inheritance. The only acceptable leader is someone who was born so rich that he leads as a hobby.
  - delecti 11mo ago
    That strategy is pretty hit or miss though. Sure we've got Kennedy or FDR, but we've also got Bush and Trump.
    - thaumasiotes 11mo ago
      I'm not saying that's a useful thing to believe. I'm saying that's what people do believe.
  - InitialLastName 11mo ago
    Alternately: Self-made wealth is so frequently derived from evil that those who are born rich and come good owe penance for the sins of their forebears.
- greedo 11mo ago
  Nebraska has a unicameral legislature that isn't in session year round. Pay is $12k/year (with travel per diem). This low salary leads to an older cohort of senators, either retired or wealthy enough to work part time. This low salary completely neuters the ability of younger people to enter state politics until they've amassed enough money to survive for four years.
- Tempest1981 11mo ago
  > requirements that you sacrifice your retirement and financial well being Holding index funds seems reasonable (Total Stock Market, S&P 500)... not a huge sacrifice imo
  - maerF0x0 11mo ago
    Definitely prefer something like Total market, even 500 companies is too much of a bias towards one group. Especially with the S&P500 currently looking like an S&P10...
  - sidrag22 11mo ago
    this feels like a no brainer solution, but just seems like a wonderful wishlist that won't happen, ive heard it a lot. I am wondering why i don't hear anything like: if a church or group representing a church get involved with politics, through lobbying or any other type of means, their tax free status is revoked and they are treated like a normal entity. it seems like a similar type of thing that in my eyes at least, is a no brainer, but is just as likely to be chopped down because of how our current system functions.
- HighGoldstein 11mo ago
  > Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs. I see this argument a lot, but I think it treats people as uniform input-output machines. Singapore is successful in this regard because of much more severe and very real penalties for corruption, and because not "everyone does this". You can't bribe immoral people into behaving morally, because in the absence of morals they have no incentive not to just take your bribe and keep doing what they're doing. A significant number of corrupt public "servants" are multi-millionaires, no amount of money will ever be enough for them.
- IgorPartola 11mo ago
  Or we can recruit lawmakers how we choose juries: randomly. Every two years we randomly select 435 individuals to serve in the House and 100 random people for the Senate. We pay them well, and they pass a basic literacy test. No money in politics, no parties. You have to for a coalition to govern. One objection could be this: but what if we hire unqualified people. The counterargument: do you think are current legislators are more or less qualified than an average person? Another objection: but what if they don’t want to do it? Counterargument: when a juror does not want to be on a case, they are almost always dismissed from it. Doesn’t mean you get to skip jury duty, just that you don’t get to do that one. One last one: this will disrupt those people’s lives. Counter argument: what Congress is and isn’t doing right now is disrupting everyone’s lives as are lobbyists and special interest groups. Something similar has been done in Ireland with their assemblies. And I do think that if you cannot convince 535 randomly selected average citizens that a law should be passed, that law is probably not worth passing. Democracy is a terrible form of government. It’s just that it is about 5x better than anything else we have invented so far. Doesn’t mean we should stop looking for a better system.
  - ragebol 11mo ago
    Sounds very interesting, but one more counter-points I'd like to see counter-countered: These random people will have to rely on experts a lot for knowledge they lack on any topic, because the world is complex. Now, these experts can be biased, bought, influenced etc. Or be accused of being in some sort of "Deep State" if you're into that. But then again, this can already be the case, now I counter-countered myself.
    - IgorPartola 11mo ago
      That’s exactly it: we already have this in the form of the lobby industrial complex. Except it is possibly quite a bit worse because if you stay in Congress for a long time and form a trusting relationship with your lobbyists who by the way also pay to your reelection campaign or support you in other ways, over time you get to accept their expert opinion with less skepticism. If a lobbyist has to start over every 2 years, they can’t sink their teeth as hard into you. And I doubt many congresspeople are experts on most subjects on which they write laws. Some have economics degrees. Some are doctors, some are lawyers. Very few engineers, it seems. If you wanted an alternative system: you could always have a professional group of law writers and a professional group of law opposers try to present arguments to a large assembly of law jurors. If they can’t get 2/3rds majority on a law, it doesn’t pass. This is better than something like direct democracy where everyone votes on an issue because you can’t get the voters’ attention on any one thing for more than a few minutes or a few hours at the most (except a small fraction for whom it is their life for a while). In this law jury setup you can properly brief them. You could have some other body of professional governors who do things like emergency resolutions and maybe basic budget stuff but anything beyond that goes to the assembly for approval. You could create a new assembly as often as every 6 weeks and process a batch of laws at once so that you really rotate out the jurors before they can be influenced. And selection of law writers and law opposers can be something that is reviewed by this kind of assembly too, or just some large pool of professionals who are chosen at random for any given period of time and given the power to present before the assembly. A lot of options here for how to amortize bad behavior such that over the long haul it averages out to close to zero.
- charlieyu1 11mo ago
  Hong Kong already showed that paying public servants well doesn’t stop corruption.
  - throwaway2037 11mo ago
    This is untrue. The programme to improve public servant pay started in the 1960s because British businesses were struggling with local corruption. (The Brits didn't do it out of the kindness of their colonizer hearts!) As a result, public servant pay was increased dramatically, then indexed with inflation, to ensure that most public servant roles were middle class and above. This greatly reduced corruption. If you think that having big trials about corruption is a sign that you country has a lot of corruption, I would say just the opposite. Having those big trials is proof that your anti-corruption police force (ICAC) and the court system is working. To be clear, I know if this changing since Hongkong became a single party state in the last few years.
    - throwaway2037 11mo ago
      Edit: To be clear, I don't know if this changed since...
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- superxpro12 11mo ago
  On a similar note, the NHL has a lot of problems with its referee program (they only recruit washed up AHL players with zero passion or experience in officiating), but one thing they seem to get right is that they pay the NHL ref's full time professional salaries up to 250k. Just to ref. With the goal that they're compensated enough to not worry about betting scandals or anything that can ruin the integrity of the game.
- akudha 11mo ago
  Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well Congressmen get paid 170K/year, get pension after only 5 years (MTG is leaving just after she becomes eligible), plus they only work like 6 months in a year, right? Not sure about healthcare and other benefits. While they can't get rich on this salary, this does seem pretty decent salary and perks, right? How do other democracies solve this problem?
- sackfield 11mo ago
  Countries like Singapore figured out that high reward / high risk (e.g. punishment) is the essence of capitalism and thus retaining talent in the public sector. EDIT: You will notice a lot of talk about high pay. It's important to note that this is not without major punishment for financial mismanagement. You can't have one without the other, it's not just a question of giving politicians a bigger trough to put their snout in.
- throwaway2037 11mo ago
  > Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs. And most highly developed, democratic nations don't pay their highest gov't officials very well. Yet, they continue to attract high quality people. The only "proof" that I can offer: Look at G7 and similarly developed democratic nations (the richest per capita on Earth). If they struggled to attract the best and brightest into gov't, eventually things would decline due to economic mismanagement. Instead: They have not. Those nations have been rich for 50 years and will be rich for many more years into the future because they have high quality people in gov't making effective policy.
ookblah 11mo ago
maybe capital gains for politicians should be increased to like 80% and redirected entirely to public service funds lol. i'm just throwing random crap out there but haven't thought it thru at all for 2.
- earlyreturns 11mo ago
  Yes, I’m sure they’ll vote for that.
  - maerF0x0 11mo ago
    Then we shouldnt vote for them...
    - kelnos 11mo ago
      That means that you shouldn't vote at all, then. Good luck getting 60 Senate candidates and 218 House candidates who would agree to something like that on ballots all over the country, with a chance in hell of winning.
      - maerF0x0 10mo ago
        We would get them if we actually supported them and participated-- in time, money and votes.
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
> They shouldn't be allowed to trade stocks. I'd be okay letting them invest in S&P500 and that's about it.
- octoberfranklin 11mo ago
  This is called the PELOSI Act: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-advances-pelosi-act-to-ban-congressional-stock-trading-out-of-committee/ https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-advances-pelosi-act-to-...
newsoftheday 11mo ago
The idea sounds tempting at first but the founders set it up so congressmen could be voted in for decades or voted out. The real issue in my view is, why are constituents not voting the scoundrels out.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  You can't vote a scoundrel out without voting another scoundrel in. There's no option for "vacant seat".
- kelnos 11mo ago
  Because you don't vote people out, you vote people in (or abstain from voting, which is just letting someone else decide who to vote in). If all the options on the ballot are scoundrels, which seems to often be the case, you're kinda stuck.
hopelite 11mo ago
Or maybe if they do trade, their trades have to be on a month long delay. The transparency should take out any corruption on the duration and it will incentivize their investment on long term gains and allow the public to also participate and make their insider knowledge. The current lag timed reporting requirement is a decent start, but fact of the matter is that it still allows Reps to take advantage of insider knowledge to profit and thereby basically be bribed in circuitous ways not really all that different than a mobster/teamster accidentally leaving behind a suitcase of cash after they dinner party the politician invited him to, just even more obfuscated and structured.
testfoobar 11mo ago
It is instructive to ask why voters are uninterested or incapable of selecting honest politicians? Or another way to state my point: voters are getting exactly the politicians they voted for. There is no majority-constituency that seeks a different group - because majority voters already have the ballot power to select different politicians.
- trentnix 11mo ago
  Indeed, an informed electorate voting in self-beneficial ways is the only perfect answer. As Milton Friedman said: What is important is not the particular person who is elected President or the party he belongs to. I have often said we shall not correct the state of affairs by electing the right people; we’ve tried that. The right people before they’re elected become the wrong people after they’re elected. The important thing is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. If it is not politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either.
mrinterweb 11mo ago
I would rather congressional representatives be paid more and have much stricter rules (with sufficient oversight and penalties), than what we have now. Also the "revolving door" where congress members become lobbyists when they leave is no good. Not to mention that campaign fundraising starts the day they swear in, so they become beholden to their donors. Bribes, campaign contributions, what's the difference? Federal US politician incentives are pretty much designed for corruption.

Aurornis 11mo ago

> It should be an expected price of public service that you remove yourself from most other ambitions. Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs. If you make part of the job requirements that you sacrifice your retirement and financial well being for the good of the country you’re just targeting a type of politician you wish existed, not real people. > I'd hope that if they were required to live off of their (rapidly depreciating) savings and income The problem with your line of thinking is that “they” is not a fixed set of candidates. If you forced them to have “rapidly depreciating” financial states to take the job, you’d lose a lot of candidates. I know you’d like to imagine they’d be replaced by perfect utopian candidates who only have your best interests in mind, but in reality if you make people financially desperate they’re actually more likely to look for ways to commit fraud for self-benefit. Imagine the desperate lawmaker watching their family’s retirement “rapidly depreciate” who gets a visit from a lobbyist who can get their kid a sweet $200K/yr do-nothing job if they can just slip a little amendment into a law. The populist movement to punish lawmakers is self-defeating.

ekianjo 11mo ago
> Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well So insider trading is not a thing among Singapore's ruling class?
- toephu2 11mo ago
  Singapore pays its public officials high salaries primarily to ensure the integrity and quality of its government. The official justification centers on attracting top talent who could otherwise command high incomes in the private sector, thereby establishing a "clean wage" that reduces the financial incentive for corruption. Salaries are explicitly benchmarked to the median income of the nation's highest earners. e.g., Singapore PM annual salary: ~$1.63 million USD Singapore President salary: ~$1.14 million USD
  - danny_codes 11mo ago
    This makes so much sense to me. If the public sector is compensated the same or slightly better than the public, then naturally we’d attract the best people to the public sector. Personally I never considered a career in the public sector mostly because there is an expectation in my country (US) that I would be poorly compensated.
  - throwaway2037 11mo ago
    To be clear, the Sing president has essentially no power -- it is a figurehead, mostly. It is a parliamentary system.
thaumasiotes 11mo ago
Compare the observation that in superhero comics, wealthy villains can be self-made, while wealthy heroes invariably get that way through inheritance. The only acceptable leader is someone who was born so rich that he leads as a hobby.
- delecti 11mo ago
  That strategy is pretty hit or miss though. Sure we've got Kennedy or FDR, but we've also got Bush and Trump.
  - thaumasiotes 11mo ago
    I'm not saying that's a useful thing to believe. I'm saying that's what people do believe.
- InitialLastName 11mo ago
  Alternately: Self-made wealth is so frequently derived from evil that those who are born rich and come good owe penance for the sins of their forebears.
greedo 11mo ago
Nebraska has a unicameral legislature that isn't in session year round. Pay is $12k/year (with travel per diem). This low salary leads to an older cohort of senators, either retired or wealthy enough to work part time. This low salary completely neuters the ability of younger people to enter state politics until they've amassed enough money to survive for four years.
Tempest1981 11mo ago
> requirements that you sacrifice your retirement and financial well being Holding index funds seems reasonable (Total Stock Market, S&P 500)... not a huge sacrifice imo
- maerF0x0 11mo ago
  Definitely prefer something like Total market, even 500 companies is too much of a bias towards one group. Especially with the S&P500 currently looking like an S&P10...
- sidrag22 11mo ago
  this feels like a no brainer solution, but just seems like a wonderful wishlist that won't happen, ive heard it a lot. I am wondering why i don't hear anything like: if a church or group representing a church get involved with politics, through lobbying or any other type of means, their tax free status is revoked and they are treated like a normal entity. it seems like a similar type of thing that in my eyes at least, is a no brainer, but is just as likely to be chopped down because of how our current system functions.
HighGoldstein 11mo ago
> Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs. I see this argument a lot, but I think it treats people as uniform input-output machines. Singapore is successful in this regard because of much more severe and very real penalties for corruption, and because not "everyone does this". You can't bribe immoral people into behaving morally, because in the absence of morals they have no incentive not to just take your bribe and keep doing what they're doing. A significant number of corrupt public "servants" are multi-millionaires, no amount of money will ever be enough for them.
IgorPartola 11mo ago
Or we can recruit lawmakers how we choose juries: randomly. Every two years we randomly select 435 individuals to serve in the House and 100 random people for the Senate. We pay them well, and they pass a basic literacy test. No money in politics, no parties. You have to for a coalition to govern. One objection could be this: but what if we hire unqualified people. The counterargument: do you think are current legislators are more or less qualified than an average person? Another objection: but what if they don’t want to do it? Counterargument: when a juror does not want to be on a case, they are almost always dismissed from it. Doesn’t mean you get to skip jury duty, just that you don’t get to do that one. One last one: this will disrupt those people’s lives. Counter argument: what Congress is and isn’t doing right now is disrupting everyone’s lives as are lobbyists and special interest groups. Something similar has been done in Ireland with their assemblies. And I do think that if you cannot convince 535 randomly selected average citizens that a law should be passed, that law is probably not worth passing. Democracy is a terrible form of government. It’s just that it is about 5x better than anything else we have invented so far. Doesn’t mean we should stop looking for a better system.
- ragebol 11mo ago
  Sounds very interesting, but one more counter-points I'd like to see counter-countered: These random people will have to rely on experts a lot for knowledge they lack on any topic, because the world is complex. Now, these experts can be biased, bought, influenced etc. Or be accused of being in some sort of "Deep State" if you're into that. But then again, this can already be the case, now I counter-countered myself.
  - IgorPartola 11mo ago
    That’s exactly it: we already have this in the form of the lobby industrial complex. Except it is possibly quite a bit worse because if you stay in Congress for a long time and form a trusting relationship with your lobbyists who by the way also pay to your reelection campaign or support you in other ways, over time you get to accept their expert opinion with less skepticism. If a lobbyist has to start over every 2 years, they can’t sink their teeth as hard into you. And I doubt many congresspeople are experts on most subjects on which they write laws. Some have economics degrees. Some are doctors, some are lawyers. Very few engineers, it seems. If you wanted an alternative system: you could always have a professional group of law writers and a professional group of law opposers try to present arguments to a large assembly of law jurors. If they can’t get 2/3rds majority on a law, it doesn’t pass. This is better than something like direct democracy where everyone votes on an issue because you can’t get the voters’ attention on any one thing for more than a few minutes or a few hours at the most (except a small fraction for whom it is their life for a while). In this law jury setup you can properly brief them. You could have some other body of professional governors who do things like emergency resolutions and maybe basic budget stuff but anything beyond that goes to the assembly for approval. You could create a new assembly as often as every 6 weeks and process a batch of laws at once so that you really rotate out the jurors before they can be influenced. And selection of law writers and law opposers can be something that is reviewed by this kind of assembly too, or just some large pool of professionals who are chosen at random for any given period of time and given the power to present before the assembly. A lot of options here for how to amortize bad behavior such that over the long haul it averages out to close to zero.
charlieyu1 11mo ago
Hong Kong already showed that paying public servants well doesn’t stop corruption.
- throwaway2037 11mo ago
  This is untrue. The programme to improve public servant pay started in the 1960s because British businesses were struggling with local corruption. (The Brits didn't do it out of the kindness of their colonizer hearts!) As a result, public servant pay was increased dramatically, then indexed with inflation, to ensure that most public servant roles were middle class and above. This greatly reduced corruption. If you think that having big trials about corruption is a sign that you country has a lot of corruption, I would say just the opposite. Having those big trials is proof that your anti-corruption police force (ICAC) and the court system is working. To be clear, I know if this changing since Hongkong became a single party state in the last few years.
  - throwaway2037 11mo ago
    Edit: To be clear, I don't know if this changed since...
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
superxpro12 11mo ago
On a similar note, the NHL has a lot of problems with its referee program (they only recruit washed up AHL players with zero passion or experience in officiating), but one thing they seem to get right is that they pay the NHL ref's full time professional salaries up to 250k. Just to ref. With the goal that they're compensated enough to not worry about betting scandals or anything that can ruin the integrity of the game.
akudha 11mo ago
Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well Congressmen get paid 170K/year, get pension after only 5 years (MTG is leaving just after she becomes eligible), plus they only work like 6 months in a year, right? Not sure about healthcare and other benefits. While they can't get rich on this salary, this does seem pretty decent salary and perks, right? How do other democracies solve this problem?
sackfield 11mo ago
Countries like Singapore figured out that high reward / high risk (e.g. punishment) is the essence of capitalism and thus retaining talent in the public sector. EDIT: You will notice a lot of talk about high pay. It's important to note that this is not without major punishment for financial mismanagement. You can't have one without the other, it's not just a question of giving politicians a bigger trough to put their snout in.
throwaway2037 11mo ago
> Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs. And most highly developed, democratic nations don't pay their highest gov't officials very well. Yet, they continue to attract high quality people. The only "proof" that I can offer: Look at G7 and similarly developed democratic nations (the richest per capita on Earth). If they struggled to attract the best and brightest into gov't, eventually things would decline due to economic mismanagement. Instead: They have not. Those nations have been rich for 50 years and will be rich for many more years into the future because they have high quality people in gov't making effective policy.

ookblah 11mo ago

maybe capital gains for politicians should be increased to like 80% and redirected entirely to public service funds lol. i'm just throwing random crap out there but haven't thought it thru at all for 2.

earlyreturns 11mo ago
Yes, I’m sure they’ll vote for that.
- maerF0x0 11mo ago
  Then we shouldnt vote for them...
  - kelnos 11mo ago
    That means that you shouldn't vote at all, then. Good luck getting 60 Senate candidates and 218 House candidates who would agree to something like that on ballots all over the country, with a chance in hell of winning.
    - maerF0x0 10mo ago
      We would get them if we actually supported them and participated-- in time, money and votes.

giancarlostoro 11mo ago

> They shouldn't be allowed to trade stocks. I'd be okay letting them invest in S&P500 and that's about it.

octoberfranklin 11mo ago
This is called the PELOSI Act: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-advances-pelosi-act-to-ban-congressional-stock-trading-out-of-committee/ https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-advances-pelosi-act-to-...

newsoftheday 11mo ago

The idea sounds tempting at first but the founders set it up so congressmen could be voted in for decades or voted out. The real issue in my view is, why are constituents not voting the scoundrels out.

ryandrake 11mo ago
You can't vote a scoundrel out without voting another scoundrel in. There's no option for "vacant seat".
kelnos 11mo ago
Because you don't vote people out, you vote people in (or abstain from voting, which is just letting someone else decide who to vote in). If all the options on the ballot are scoundrels, which seems to often be the case, you're kinda stuck.

hopelite 11mo ago

Or maybe if they do trade, their trades have to be on a month long delay. The transparency should take out any corruption on the duration and it will incentivize their investment on long term gains and allow the public to also participate and make their insider knowledge. The current lag timed reporting requirement is a decent start, but fact of the matter is that it still allows Reps to take advantage of insider knowledge to profit and thereby basically be bribed in circuitous ways not really all that different than a mobster/teamster accidentally leaving behind a suitcase of cash after they dinner party the politician invited him to, just even more obfuscated and structured.

testfoobar 11mo ago

It is instructive to ask why voters are uninterested or incapable of selecting honest politicians? Or another way to state my point: voters are getting exactly the politicians they voted for. There is no majority-constituency that seeks a different group - because majority voters already have the ballot power to select different politicians.

trentnix 11mo ago
Indeed, an informed electorate voting in self-beneficial ways is the only perfect answer. As Milton Friedman said: What is important is not the particular person who is elected President or the party he belongs to. I have often said we shall not correct the state of affairs by electing the right people; we’ve tried that. The right people before they’re elected become the wrong people after they’re elected. The important thing is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. If it is not politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either.

mrinterweb 11mo ago

I would rather congressional representatives be paid more and have much stricter rules (with sufficient oversight and penalties), than what we have now. Also the "revolving door" where congress members become lobbyists when they leave is no good. Not to mention that campaign fundraising starts the day they swear in, so they become beholden to their donors. Bribes, campaign contributions, what's the difference? Federal US politician incentives are pretty much designed for corruption.