The US needs a blanket federal law, perhaps even a constitutional amendment, that precludes any publicly elected official or appointee at any level from directly owning individual stocks. How could anyone possibly argue against that?
1. That's overly restrictive. Why not let them own individual stocks in, say, a blind trust?
2. It's a free country. It's up to the voters to decide if they want to elect someone who profits from their position. What is needed is a law requiring public disclosure, not prohibition.
3. If you force people to divest their portfolios before taking public office you will reduce the pool of people willing to serve.
This is not to say that I disagree with the policy position, only that it's not the slam-dunk you seem to think it is.
Dissuading the wealthy from seeking office sounds like a feature, not a bug to me.
Around 55% of Americans own stock.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...
If you aren't one of that "wealthiest 10%" it would not be difficult to divest your stock holdings in exchange for an index fund.
2. Again, how is a normal person - say, a retail employee - ever going to find out about this? Even with public disclosure, all folks need to do to hide their doings is to make the language in the disclosure full of technical jargon instead of everyday language.
3. That's a bonus, not a feature. Maybe it'll encourage normal folks to take office more often - but of course, we'd have to do other changes to make that happen.
They are not blanket total bans in most cases, but single name stuff is often very restricted, broad market less so. Also does come with transparency requirements.
3. You would reduce the pool of people who have corrupt intent. Owning individual stocks isn't more profitable than owning ETFs.
If this were broadly adopted, companies would be forced to switch to all-cash offers, to create long-term incentive plans that don’t use something the legislation defines as shares, or just be content to exclude politically active people from being employees. Some might be happy with that last outcome.
Many publicly elected or appointed roles are part-time (school board/committee, city council, etc.) Even MA state legislators make only $70.5K/yr and MA is one of the highest-paying states for that job. Many of them maintain another full-time job.
https://ballotpedia.org/Comparison_of_state_legislative_sala...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966192 (edit window is 2 hours)
1. Too bad. There are plenty of other good investments out there.
2. Too bad. The removal of incentives to do slimy things like the ones that are subject of this article is the greater good here.
3. Too bad. Maybe those people who choose to serve will be those who aren't in it to fleece the system of every dollar they can.
I'm not sure you'd find my "counterarguments" any more persuasive than I find yours. I'm more interested in what the systemic consequences of such a policy would be, and, it seems to me that they tip in a direction that removes incentives to be corrupt, which sounds pretty darn good to me. I care a lot less about the effects on people who are currently in the position to exploit the system.
Better yet, it was because her husband success that she worked for 20 years for free for the party.
Something her husband did before she was speaker and he already had much success before.
He likes bank way more. .
The very basis of self government (citizens being in charge) is allowing people to run for office who are every day people. This idea would require anyone who is even a part owner af a tiny business to divest in order to run. Additionally, a lot of common small businesses have no real value if the owner doesn't come with the business (a solo law practice is an example)... oh, and trusts are corporations... so this idea sounds wonderful but is very exclusionary.
Insiders at companies have limited windows to trade. Makes more sense.
Arguing against that is easy.
The elite have so many better ways to profit from their positions that outlawing stock ownership is laughably naïve. Trading stocks against knowledge you obtained from your government position is an easy way to get busted, so you may assume the people caught up in this represent merely the profoundly stupid; the smart elites don't get nabbed in such simple minded schemes. Yes, there are very stupid federal judges; their appointments are a product a political haymaking that has their actual competence way down the list of priorities.
So the best reason I can think of to oppose your plan is simply that it's a futile waste of time. If you're serious about meaningful efforts to hinder corruption think in terms of transparency. Give the electorate the means to know who is bought and paid for by whom. Without that you're wasting your time.
Time is a pretty small consideration here.
One can and should apply many means to lessen corruption. Transparency is certainly important, but no means is going to cover all cases or be 100% effective. Reduce the possibility of conflict of interest and increase transparency.
The problem with transparency, if you're relying on democracy to do the rest, is that any sufficiently clever corruption scheme is simply not going to be understood by the public you're relying on to oppose it. If you give them an explanation in detail they mostly see simply that it's detailed. It looks no different from a conspiracy theory to most people, who will barely be following the issue anyway. Most voters are low information voters. The information they need is which party backs which position. They in effect vote as they're told, not because they're stupid but because none of this interests them.
I imagine this is already illegal? But isn't it harder to prove if done right?
Blind trusts seem to be quite a bit too permissive to me.
Offer them the performance of a stock index fund on their stock holdings, for the duration of their public mandate.
I don’t want my local Google employees to be prohibited from running for city council or school committee.