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... is precisely so they will be independent of influence? That, initially, legislators were not paid anything, and that one of the key propositions of Reform in Britain and similar laws in the U.S. were to ensure that legislators would be paid well enough to make them independent and thus avoid corruption? Yet it appears that that has not worked as planned, and so you propose to pay them more? It is generally considered a bad idea to reinforce failure.
Furthermore, it is a matter of faith in the corporate world that huge salaries and bonuses are necessary to hire the "best" people. Yet when these people make costly errors, they still receive high salaries and bonuses, or if their error is too costly to ignore, they are awarded golden parachutes in millions of dollars. This sort of thing is one of the reasons why our economy tanked a few years ago: there was no penalty for failure, so no reason not to take irresponsible risks. Do you think the "best" people are hired in the corporate world? For whatever value of "best" you please? Or might it be that influence is more important than "qualification" for most non-technical applications, and legislating is definitely a non-technical field. And since influence comes down to being connected to the people with the power and the money, how can you have an effective legislature without any influence?
Then we have the laws. Are there at present no laws against corruption? Is there not a standing committee in Congress with the brief to ensure ethical conduct among its members? How is that working out? What incentive do you think would make it work better? You may say that ultimately the solution rests with the voters, yet despite the lowest-ever ratings for Congress, the voters re-elect 90% of them. How do you propose to police the legislators? As Juvenal asks, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
There are some other problems with your proposal, but these should be enough to be going on with. The central issue, as I see it, is the mechanism by which you will keep money from influencing politics. After all, it has been known and understood since political theory was invented that corruption is the key problem with politics, and we have been struggling with that for a couple of thousand years. Would you prohibit all overt lobbying? Fine, but what about covert lobbying? Do you propose that legislators never be seen in the company of captains of industry, or even lieutenants? Do you propose that if it is discovered that they have met with such people, they be prohibited from ever holding an office of trust or profit in the government again? But then, doesn't that place undue limits on their liberty? And what can be done about the fact that government does require interaction with corporations, to build bombs and roads? Somebody has to talk to these people, so somebody, inevitably, is going to be tempted by them.
Of course, you're just theorizing, and not making a concrete proposal. It's when one gets down to the niggling little details that he begins to see that the difficulty is, perhaps, greater than was immediately apparent. I'd be interested to see if you can devise a way that government and business can efficiently interface without the latter unduly influencing the former.
-- Mal
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Congress & the president should be paid like CEO's. Pay them well or corporations will (Original post)
