[cogman10]

> We don't want anyone chasing Civil servitude for the money right?

That's actually probably the best reason for someone to get involved in civil service. If the salary is lucrative enough, the incentive to stay in office will be high and, importantly, money won't be a factor keeping people from getting into office.

The problems we currently have is:

- Money is an incentive to get into office, but that money comes from interaction with wealthy individuals.

- Nothing stops congress people from leveraging their public actions into lucrative private industry.

- Independently wealthy individuals have a much easier time getting elected than an average citizen.

Think of it this way, if the salary is 0, then you effectively lock out all but the wealthy from office. If the salary is just enough to get by, that still locks out potentially qualified people simply because they can get better jobs out of congress. But if it's a lucrative salary, then you not only make it so people can make it in congress, they can be more competitive against a wealthy competition. They also don't need things like "contributions" to stay afloat. You'd simply be less tempted to take a $10k bribe if it jeopardizes your $1m salary. That alone significantly raises the barrier for bribery.

But we should do that in tandem with cutting off obvious corruption routes. Being a representative should mean you can't work in private industry for 10 years. You should only be allowed to trade 2 ETFs, an all stock and all bond ETF. And the insider trading laws should result in immediate expulsion from congress.

[sopooneo]

I fully agree all your logic. But then I see a counter of "public sentiment" where I bet most citizens would be outraged by million dollar salaries.

[bumby]

You’re saying finding the people most incentivized by money is the feature we should be optimizing for?

If you select those people, what’s to keep them from creating a system that gives them ever more amounts of money, to the detriment of their constituents?

Maybe a better system for selecting civil servants is…I dunno…a system that optimizes for that “service” part? It’s shocking how in the last few decades we’ve convinced ourselves that money is the only filter that motivates people and is the inherent driver of all human action.

[InitialBP]

"If you select those people, what’s to keep them from creating a system that gives them ever more amounts of money, to the detriment of their constituents?"

That is literally the system that exists today, except instead of in the open (e.g. salary) it's through stocks with insider information and who knows how else.

The point isn't to optimize for people who are most incentivized through money, the point is to make the position more accessible for anyone who actually wants to do the "service" part, and to minimize the reasons that it's hard. As the previous commenter pointed out, right now independently wealthy people are some of the only ones who are actually capable of running, and someone who isn't independently wealthy who wins is even more susceptible to bribes because they may be in a tenuous financial position.

I would agree with you that we want individuals who's goal is to do "service" for their society, but our current system obviously isn't working and there are a lot of solid reasons why something like this _could_ improve the situation, what alternatives would you recommend?

[bumby]

>That is literally the system that exists today

Agreed. But the difference is I'm saying a better solution is to adjust the incentives rather than just keeping the same incentives but making it more transparent.

I would be in favor of higher pay for Congress given the limits of the job (maintaining at least two residences in DC and their home state, for example). Perhaps we just disagree on the level. I don't want it to be "lucrative" as you said originally (ie I don't want it to be a way to get rich), but it should be high enough to not be prohibitive to go into service. There are also some knock-on effects that would need to be managed; for example, I think overall civil servant pay is pegged to Congressional pay limits. Other solutions may be to have designated Congressional housing (so at least they can't use the housing cost as an excuse).