Becoming a politician is a bit like becoming a musician: Spend the best years of your life 'putting your time in' with a 98% chance you'll never make it big. Only the 2% that made it big get offered those $500k/year sinecures.
If you're already in the powerful 2% you've probably already compromised on your principles many times to get there, so the $500k/year for compromising them a little more is practically free money.
If you're entering politics, though? As you've only got a 2% chance of making the $500k, the expected value is only $10k. Not much of a motivation.
> then why are so few people interested in becoming politicians?
Obviously because they can't afford to because they actually have to work.
Uh... what? There's a shortage of politicians nowhere, lol.
The US system steers naturally towards two parties that both advance corporate interests, and that's what's happening now.
I really should've saved that story because I can't find it anywhere now.
Basically, on the streets, most people supported him. In reality, people weren't enough. If they even mattered. Turned out you had to align yourself with one of the four major parties or you had zero chance at gaining traction in any county that mattered. Funnily enough, the "easy" counties would be even harder - low population, low income, lack of education, low voter turnout, always voting for populists/authoritarians.
The major parties have the power and the money and there was no way they'd ever let a newcomer just barge in without being vetted first. The majority of new parties were absorbed into the big ones.
This is a joke, I don't know what's to be done about it and I'm sure that's the case in other countries, too. Only good thing is politicians stay out of private business as they're starting to realize the richer the private population becomes, the richer they will be.
And even then, they fail at making a better environment for small businesses, instead choosing to focus on big companies, especially foreign ones. Let them come, buy up everything for cheap and use the population as cheap labor forever. Why would the government care?