"Captain Gains" on Capitol Hill

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.

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.

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.

> 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

Hong Kong already showed that paying public servants well doesn’t stop corruption.

> 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.

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.

This is called the PELOSI Act:

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-advances-pelosi-act-to-...

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.

Yes, I’m sure they’ll vote for that.

That creates more trading opportunities tbh and eventually the market will calibrate. Similar has happened to trump and his tarrifs plus all those truth/xitter messages.

The goal isn't to make it impossible to do insider trading, it's to set some controls and have consequences when they aren't followed.

The middle man scheme you mention would be illegal under OP's idea. So prosecute everyone involved. The more people involved, the harder to hide it.

Your argument is basically "it doesn't make sense to have murder be illegal because the law won't prevent the bullet from flying."

Yeah, unfortunately.

This is pervasive in China; the politicians kid is the middleman. One child policy, so there's at most one kid -- makes it easy to know who to give the stock tips to.

Billionaires benefit from it, they are the ones buying off our government. All the other "wedge issues" are designed to deflect attention away from our oligarchs and both parties are on the take. Look at how the DNC reacted to Mamdani for a recent example.

To be clear, because I know it will come up - not saying both parties are the same, but I am saying they are both doing the oligarch's bidding. The US government is now fully captured by billionaires and is currently being used for personal enrichment of those in power.

The election systems are managed at the state level exactly as they should be. Corruption has a much lower chance when there are barriers.

That said, there should be national minimum standards for the elections.

Chain of custody is something all elections adhere to in the US, but if it's not a federal requirement, it should be.

What's really needed are hand marked paper ballots, electronically counted using open, independently audited machines with no network connectivity (obviously). "Scantron" style machines That should be a minimum requirement.

Nobody stole the election from the doddering old fool in 2020. Internet bullshit doesn't stand up in court where they do have evidence standards.

Edit: Back on topic ... individual stock trading by representatives clearly should be illegal. And apparently we need more independent watchdogs with better protections against a puppet who mindlessly goes along with the last person to manipulate them.

>Maybe the media benefits from it?

Nah.

We just love our dog whistles.

Abortion!!

Immigrants!!

The billionaires are stealing from you!!

Libtards!!

Right wing shooters!!

Oh yeah, almost forgot..

Something, something blacks!!!

That's how you win elections these days.

You can try to win an election on something substantive, say, infrastructure repair and updates for instance. But the wedge issue fueled campaigns are gonna wipe the floor with you.

We the people have voted on this over and over. The data is irrefutable. We love our wedge issues.

This article was about members of the US congress so their salaries are $174k for your run-of-the-mill congressperson and higher for leadership roles. $174k is a very comfortable salary.

"Mayor" where I live is effectively a volunteer position. Raising the salary would require the village fully fund the position for the extent of a mayoral term which is too expensive.

So instead they hire a city manager who basically runs everything, at a much higher salary, which meets budget rules since they could in theory fire him if they run out of money. Hence the city manager is an unelected strong executive, which is not good for democracy.

> That self-selects out the majority of qualified candidates who must work for a living.

Occupations like "landlord" and "car dealership owner" are wildly overrepresented in local government because they have high incomes with virtually no time commitment.

These people aren't necessarily unqualified, but their motivation for holding office isn't usually aligned with the needs of the average member of the public.

Here in NJ, I live in a small town of around 7,000 or so. We have a Township Committee form of government, five committee people with one nominally as Mayor (but really the same as everyone else). They get a yearly stipend of around $5,000 a year or a little less.

It sounds crazy but our whole muni budget is under $5 million. We have almost no infrastructure other than roads (98% of housing is on well water and septic systems, there are no street lights or sewers or the like).

A lot of municipal government in the US is like this. Very small with near-volunteers running everything.

You are right that this rules out a lot of people who can't afford to effectively volunteer for local government. I think mostly this is a good thing.

125k people, $9,000 for the city council position in my area.

> In my town, the mayor and council make about $30k each while the median income in the city is well over $100k and houses cost over $1M.

The chief of police summons a recently enrolled policeman in his office: "The accounting called, and apparently you never picked your pay cheques in the last 6 months? What's up with that?" ― "Wait, we get paid? I thought it was, you get the badge and then gun, and then you're on your own!"

The things with jokes, however, is that they probably should not become reality.

The idea is that if their salary does not actually cover the expenses of living in and traveling to DC to do their job, you are limiting the pool of potential congressional representatives to those who are independently wealthy or who are finding other ways to make money via their position.

Paying enough to cover the expenses of the job isn't a solution to all problems, just kind of a minimum bar if we want a normal person to be able do the job without relying on other income sources.

Lee Drutman advocates for ranked choice voting, but implementations in the USA still degenerated to 2 parties. RCV still has a spoiler effect. https://realrcv.equal.vote/alaska22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU

Instead, we need approval voting, or even STAR voting. https://www.equal.vote/

(Drutman appears to have somewhat changed his views on RCV, but I don't think his "fusion voting" idea will catch on until we have multiple parties in the first place. https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/blog/how-i-updat... )

It's funny. In my failing democracy people are convinced the solution is a two party system like the US (we have a parliament with a large amount of parties)

Somehow I have a feeling the problem is not the system, but the culture...

> From my perspective it would make a lot more sense to only allow index fund purchases as an elected official.

The new leader[1] of the Norwegian wealth fund[2] had a large stock portfolio. There was some debacle given the influential nature of the wealth fund.

He agreed to sell the stocks and buy index funds instead, until he resigned from that position.

As you say, I think that's very reasonable. They can still make money off the general stock market lkkd the rest so they're not disadvantaged, but have very limited opportunity to benefit significantly from inside deals.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolai_Tangen

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...

I agree, but the substance of the issue is that their pay has remained the same since 2009 at $174k/year (i.e. not kept up with inflation at all) so if we want to discourage corrupt behavior then giving them a proper salary is probably a good idea if we're going to restrict other methods of building wealth.

They should benchmark to early USA and Singapore and corporations.

George Washington was paid 4x Trump, I believe.

In the context of corruption cleanup, I think people understand that paying people well avoids corruption. Mexican cops, that sort of thing.

Yes, not popular, but important.

It also wouldn't help anything.

$174k to $223k + allowances up to $2 million

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL30064#:~:text=The%20c...

Not enough to attracted talented, sane people with strong ethical values

I understand this, but at the same time the concept of this to me is absolutely wild.

We see this in the UK, the exact same argument. Yet I was paid more to manage a small tech team than an MP for fewer hours. You actively disincentivise people like me from taking public positions. I'm doing tech contracting and earn more than Prime Minister.

The UK gets about a trillion dollars a year in, and spends more. The US takes in something like five trillion dollars.

An exceptionally small improvement in improving the economy pays for itself indefinitely because these countries are absolutely enormous. Our MPs are paid about 90k/year, if you could improve the tax take of the government by 0.1% by improving the economy in some way *once* you could pay them £1M/year *tax free* and you could pay that *forever* even if future people aren't as good they're just not actively detrimental. This is also for paying people who aren't actually making big decisions, just the elected representatives.

Money should not be an issue, missing a good person because of the money is utter insanity given the payback.

Because the most capable among us are able to command high salaries regardless of whether they're 'in it for the money'. Congress needs to be competitive with industry for the best talent.

Also, giving politicians legitimate income makes them less susceptible to bribery and other forms of unethical income.

> Do you also advocate putting a little pot of cash ...

Yes, obviously I would support that /s

The idea of increasing pay for members of Congress is that we naturally discourage seeking out other forms of building wealth and/or paying bills while in office regardless of existing laws. You can also have laws that explicitly stop things like insider trading too, but obviously you can't solve for every scenario so this would be a blanket solution.

I understand that corruption can't be solved by this one action and that members can still be corrupt after a pay increase, but on the whole, I think it'd be a positive change. It's a hard problem to solve without burning everything down... which only sounds good in theory and may not result in a better system.

You're wrong on both counts

It is illegal for Congress to trade on insider information (it just isn't well enforced)

It is NOT illegal to trade based on a list of stocks they bought after the fact. That's not insider information.

> It is not illegal for them to trade on their inside information. It is illegal for you to trade on their inside information. So they can send you their stock picks list and gloat about their ROI, but if you invest on the basis of the newsletter, you go to jail.

All the Congress member trades are public. There are even ETFs now that track the Congress member trades. So you can just buy such an ETF and have a one-to-one replication of the Congress member portfolio.

I've seen those empathy circles, where liberals care more about people on the fringe of society, and conservatives care more about people in the middle of society (apologies, if I'm butchering the explanation.)

I'm curious, has anyone done schadenfreude circles, where they measure how much people enjoy watching someone else suffer? I mean, of course they have, that's why we have TV shows like Cops and Jerry Springer, right?

That's like saying "why bother banning insider trading? People can just obfuscate their illegal trades".

Yeah, sometimes people can break laws and not get caught. But that's no argument against laws. Some congressmen might be able to hide their investments, but sometimes they'd get caught and plenty of them would not take the risk.

There are already insider trading laws which almost everyone has to comply with, congress people being an exception. They specifically allow insider trading for themselves while prohibiting it for everyone else.

If you work in a financial company which does trading often times you are very restricted in what you could do. You also have to report all of your accounts plus close relatives accounts.

And if you have an insider info and give it to someone else, no matter how remote from you it's still against the law to trade based on that and it's not "fully compliant with every letter of the law"

The SP500 is probably the most popular investment in America, perhaps aside from housing. Wouldn't hurt to have lawmaker's fortunes broadly aligned versus narrowly aligned with specific corporations.

Trading on inside information has that causality going on the other direction. It's them picking what stocks to buy depending on what laws are being most argued for/against. Every stock looks the same from their POV, and there's no reliable mechanism for making them prefer one law over another.

The GP is right. It's campaign contributions, career rolling doors, and direct payments that make them pick one law over another. Inside trading only let them directly steal money from the population with no strings attached.

Well it’s pretty benign if they aren’t making different decisions on laws based on existing holdings. That’s just insider trading which is a tax on the shareholders.

Bribery or anything else that affects their lawmaking decisions is significantly worse because the impact is so much larger.

Mind bending to be downvoted over this. Do people really think these people are better or smarter?