[patrec]

People like you are exactly the reason why we can't have competent politicians. Who apart from crazy ideologues, the crooked and those that can't hack it as anything else than demagogues do you expect to sign up for a job where you are a public punching ball on terrible pay and with limited ability to diverge from whatever party line or other contingencies dictate?

[ramphastidae]

Can you explain why? Obviously the current system isn’t producing competent ones either.

[patrec]

Sorry, I edited my comment to add some context. It seems very likely to me that if we could increase pay of politicians by a factor of 10 (say), we'd get much much better performance at lower effective cost than we already pay for the soft corruption of "speaking fees" and suchlike.

Unfortunately that seems to be politically infeasible (not even competent autocratic regimes can get away with paying themselves above board).