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Comment by syzarian | Hacker News Reader

That many people find this acceptable is disconcerting. We have a revolving door system whereby the top regulator knows they will get a nice payout by the regulated after their days of regulating end. Clinton’s Secretary of Treasury got a very high paying job after his repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Clinton’s themselves were richly rewarded by Wall Street.

Therein lies one of the curses of wealth inequality. Humans compare themselves to those who are better off and strive for that level of enrichment. It’s a corrupting state of affairs. Too few people have too much money.

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That is all true. But who wants to be a politician when they are public figures that are beaten, accused, humiliated by opponents, the public, and everyone really. You cannot do it right and most people will probably hate you, regardless of what you do. It's not a pleasant job. Unless you get money for all of this unpleasantness. And then, some entities have more money to give than others (you said that in your last sentence). So this attracts exactly those people to be politicians that you might not want to be politicians. Of course, some are better than others (so do go vote for the right ones), but they all need a certain trait for this job.

So how to break this unfortunate dependency? Give the 'right' entities comparably enough money to pay politicians? But how? Like climate vs. oil. OK, that's cheap, but anyway. You cannot expect the system to work with less money flow, I think.

So how to change this?

We’ve know for decades - take money out of politics and make it about civil service. To do so requires campaign finance reform (limits on spending and sources of $) as well as making lobbying illegal

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?

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

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).

Well, I'm for campaign finance but not money out of politics.

The president should be getting like 400M/yr instead of 400k/yr. But also paying for their own trips/security/housing/etc and if it turns out 400M/yr isn't enough for that then it should be a higher number.

The fact that the "execs" of congress get paid so little in salary but make it out from outside employment (or by having the government itself pay for it) hampers the rest of the government since it limits what they can pay for every other role in government. Using your ability to run the country efficiently should be a highly paying job so it causes people to actually want to do it.

This is a capitalistic society, you want to have somebody that can estimate a project accurately? You'll need to pay.

Pay so well for the role and have a sufficient pension such that you are forbidden from receiving any kind of further compensation even when you are no longer in the role (or in kind gift or direct charitable contributions). Honestly, US congress people should be paid in the high hundreds of thousands for the work they do and the control they have over the world’s largest economy. It’s kind of ridiculous how low information voters think it’s ok to punish politicians for increasing salaries but ignore the actual budget and what we spend money on because that’s complicated.

Think of it another way. Is there any other CEO or even senior director that couldn’t afford to live near their HQ? And yet, that’s true if you’re a congressperson that’s not independently wealthy. Said another way, we’re unhappy paying politician’s money from the government directly but then complain that all the politician’s are the super wealthy or find alternate income streams? This is very intentional by the way - it’s very convenient for the wealthy in the US to have a political class that is either filled with direct peers or protects them because that’s where the real money comes from even if it’s net parasitic to the US as a whole.

Be Bernie Sanders, apparently.

The bar is pretty low. Don't be an obvious crook or treat yourself like you're in a different class and flout it. Don't vote party lines if it doesn't reflect your constituency, and encourage grassroots involvement and policy voting.

Identity politics drove people off the deep end, because if you disliked Clinton's track record of neoliberal politics, her flagrant corruption and disdain for the working class, and penchant for globalism, then you failed the loyalty test and could be freely ostracized as a secret bigot or false flag operator.

That should have been quashed hard by journalists, but the media lined up, and then Big Tech started putting their fingers on the scales, and we were all left worse off for it.

Trust is earned over a lifetime of accountability and consistency, but that's harder than taking payouts from special interests and voting how your party wants. As they say, eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.

I have no idea why you were downvoted for this comment. The change, in my opinion ought to include a cap on wealth and enough pay for politicians that they can govern while living in a very comfortable lifestyle. Present day pay ought to be sufficiently high that all but the very greedy don't look longingly for a payout in the future.

No, it's a personal failing. Janet Yellen could have told them to fly a kite.

When the system massively incentivizes personal failures, that is also a failure of a system

The system always has and always will massively incentivize personal failures. That's why humans invented the concept of a "good person" -- it describes one who actively swims against the omnipresent tide. It's why people used to speak about "character" in politics. The tacit assumption is that once you're in power you are, by definition, unrestrained by external forces. The only one left who can restrain you is yourself.

It would be wise to highlight these talks as examples of profound personal failures, both for the speakers and the participants. All have succumbed to greed and corruption, and have done so in the open. I think we should promote the ideals of self-restraint once again, and expect our public servants to enjoy a comfortable, upper-middle-class life, and no more.

The single best thing we can do is to get money out of politics! The bottleneck to getting elected is, right now, money, and that's fundamentally anti-democratic. We should elect people based on their character, their ideas, their vision, their capacity for communication, and not their bank account. They should demonstrate that they value principle over loyalty, basically every time. In such a world Yellen's behavior would stick out like a sore thumb, and that's good.

> The tacit assumption is that once you're in power you are, by definition, unrestrained by external forces. The only one left who can restrain you is yourself.

I don’t understand. This is not some truth of all justice systems. It isn’t the case even in the US, except for a few limited cases.

There are a lot of parts of our system that incentivize being a good person, so I don’t know what you’re on about here.

>There are a lot of parts of our system that incentivize being a good person, so I don’t know what you’re on about here.

I'm sorry, which is the system that keeps people good? Tripartite government with separation of powers? A constitution? Tell me: what are the rules can withstand a group of bad faith players? Any system can be undermined by bad actors, on both short (personal) and long (institutional) timescales, and there is always built in incentive to do so. To wit: bribes are great for both sides if you don't get caught. Bribes given in this way may feel and appear to be like capitalism. But the iron minds who spend these enormous sums for brief appearances of past and future judges, bureaucrats and princes, do not do so out of sentiment. Nor, I think, would they bother to argue that it is so.

To claw our way back to the good Nash equilibrium we must open our eyes why the bad Nash equilibrium beckons to us all. Look around the world and see those nations that dwell, apparently permanently, in the bad equilibrium. Where everyone is backstabbing each other, demanding bribes, and so on. The rules forbid it, but they are helpless, just ink on paper. Once cheating starts, an avalanche soon follows.

We have laws and a justice system that disincentivizes bad behavior. The existence of holes in that system does not mean that an effective system is impossible. Plenty of bad person stuff is illegal and punishable.

It should be illegal (and enforceable) for regulators to be so cozy with industry. It feels like you're suggesting we just throw our hands up and say "better things aren't possible."

I don't understand this take.

What if Yellen's intention was to get a nice payout? What if, instead of a good actor making a bad choice you simply have a bad actor that is engineering their way into positions that would later benefit them through book deals?

If you can elaborate on what "get money out of politics" means and how it can prevent book deals after the fact, I'm genuinely curious.

I think building a more robust system that doesn't put the onus solely on actors within the system to be good and can be self-correcting and actually address the revolving door issue instead of just telling people to vote for good policy makers.

Good systems make bad things hard/impossible.

If she doesn’t do it they will kick her out and just get the next person in line who could be “approachable”.

Yes. It is also a systemic failure. Wealth inequality tempts too many people in the penumbra of human morality that lies between those who are saints and those who are evil.

It's a systemic failure because the public has lost clarity of thought and have forgotten entirely the importance of character in general, and self-restraint in particular, in leadership. A problem I think can be causally linked to Citizens United. Ironic that you can't get people to focus on fixing CU because CU engendered an environment that makes it hard to focus.

It's not so much that people find it discerning, is that there are only two parties in America. Because one person brings up that she made millions, means that another person will defend her because of their political ideology and party choice.

Bad behavior of politicians on both sides of the aisle should be deployed, but one person's corrupt politician is another persons freedom fighter.

Yes, the disconcerting thing is really the inability of too many voters to be consistent in their beliefs/views. Defense of "my" candidate takes precedence over applying, in a consistent way, one's moral beliefs. We have people who decry Trump's sexual deviancy whilst defending Bill Clinton's. Vice versa.

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