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Comment by prepperpotts | Hacker News Reader

one interesting, counterintuitive argument i've seen on how to prevent this is in lawrence lessig's book, "republic, lost" about the us congress.

his take is that public servants actually don't make enough money, when compared to their peers in the public sector, and that an important step to preventing regulatory capture is to pay them better. that way, people don't spend their careers in public service trying to avoid pissing off lobbyists they're hoping to work for later.

not sure if it'd work or not, or if making moves like this illegal is better, but it's definitely an interesting idea.

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Campaign cost to run for Congress has been skyrocketing for years. And the cost of living in DC is very high, especially for such public figures who are expected to host all kinds of gatherings. It is a wonder that between all these fundraisers they have time and will at all to do policymaking.

In Italy it is illegal for political parties to accept donations[1] and within bounds political parties are reimbursed for their campaign spending (or are dependent on own income)

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

Doesn't stop the problem from flowing the other direction. Often, ex-executives of major firms are now the heads of the regulatory agencies. Do these heads own lots of shares and have obvious conflicts of interest with their 'former' firms? Of course, if your significant other is on the board, well, nothing much the law can say about that either.

The real problem is far too much authority was vested (taken?) by the federal congress. Smaller government is the key to keeping the government in check.

> The real problem is far too much authority was vested (taken?) by the federal congress. Smaller government is the key to keeping the government in check.

That feels like a bit of a non sequitor. Can you elaborate? Genuinely curious.

[citation needed]

What about giving them a high potential but making their actual salary a function of approval rating? In order to maximize how much you make you have to work to unify your constituents.

I don't think you'd want this to be linear either. My feeling is you'd want the pay to stay pretty low anywhere below a 50% support level and climb pretty steeply above that, which discourages the split people down the middle mess the US is in. You'd probably accept that a small portion of people are nutcases so the salary would approach the max at around 85-90% support.

There are some potential exploits that you'd have to try to address but it's a thought.

How do you determine approval rating? The reality is that only a small percentage of the public has any idea of whom any public servant is outside of their leader.

And at that point it's easily gamed, and leads to ineffective short termist planning by the public servant.

This is a terrible idea that would be hugely damaging to the public.

In that scenario an interested party would need to do no more than pay for a small Facebook campaign to get rid of a disagreeable civil servant.

What we need is checks and balances, not an even more volatile method.

The government can't (or shouldn't) pay someone enough to compete with 7-9 figure compensation from the high end of the private sector. If someone actually creates significant value, and gets to share in some small fraction of that value, that's going to outpace any salary-based compensation.

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