Many federal employees do in fact have to limit what securities they can purchase or hold. For example, if I recall correctly, patent examiners cannot hold more than $20,000 in investments for an industry that they examine patents in, and they cannot hold more than $10,000 in stock for any company they may examine patents for. The guidance tells them to prefer index funds that capture the entire market rather than individual companies or sectors. This is explicitly to prevent conflicts of interest. If you are high up enough in these federal positions (without having to be a political appointee), you even have to complete a financial disclosure form (SF-714), and people do check these things for potential conflicts.
That said, many federal employees invest heavily in TSP funds, most of which are managed by BlackRock, so your last point about distributing them among multiple fund managers is not true in practice, since I imagine most federal employees have their investments heavily in funds managed by BlackRock.
Given two competitors in a market, what if the existing but inefficient one is in the fund but the new one that is trying to shake thing up and/or do a better job is not? You might see a lot more protectionism, and not just against companies of other nations, but against our own new best companies.
better than favoring just a few stocks you have insider info on...
A free market is a system that's based on emergent behavior. As we see time and time again, even the best and most useful and narrowly focused regulations that are beneficial when first implemented need constant review to make sure they aren't later doing more harm than good. Carving out a big chunk of the market as likely to get special behavior regardless of the normal inputs and outputs could outright be disastrous, IMO.
If you were limited to GM and Ford, would you want a Tesla or Rivian to exist? If you were limited to K-Mart, would you want Wal-Mart to exist? If you limited to Sears, would you want Lowes, Home Depot, and Best Buy to exist?
Basically any restriction that can be imagined would incentive various other bad behaviors that might actively be anticompetitive.
If you mean something like that then your proposal seems overly restrictive. I don't see any point in say the USGS not being able to hire a seismologist they want to hire because the seismologist can't convince his brother to sell his Microsoft stock and his adult daughter to get rid of her Apple stock. Nothing that seismologist would be able to working at USGS is going to influence those stocks, nor is his work going to provide him with any inside information.
I mean, as long as we're using investment restrictions for social engineering.
There's no restrictions on insider trading, except that the disclosure requirement is immediate (upon trade execution) and non-anonymous. AKA, the price of a stock is reflective of the information available - and any insider that tries to take advantage of such information will necessarily reveal it the nano-second they make the trade.
I mean, with the amount of corruption, would it not be possible to get all info from the trust and give decisions, one way or the other?
Those people do exist, we've just configured our electoral system in every way to discourage such admirable behavior.
It doesn't have to be full of opportunistic palm greasing scoundrels, we've just set it up that way.
... people convinced that the graft in office would offset the loss of opportunity from investment gains.
You can find them at state parks, libraries, museums and schools even. I've met plenty of scientists for instance, that work at universities, places like MBARI and JPL and for the city/county at lower salaries without stock options for the opportunity of public service.
They're real, we just need to get more of them in higher office
Sure, I'm one of them.
If you think that for the subset of public service that constitutes "electoral politics", that cutting people out of the opportunity to have investment income while in office is going to restrict office holding to those people, than you are, well, hopeliessly naive. Compared to the status quo, you'll eliminate some good people who would have been happy enough putting their investments in a blind trust and not been acting out of conflicts with their own investments, and you'll eliminate some people for whom the ability to serve their own investments was a deciding factor, but there's all kinds of corrupt interests that don't rely on having investments in ones own name that people pursue in politics.
relying on altruism is not what i would call scalable nor stable.
The rules of the system should be such that the optimal/desirable behaviour is also the selfish behaviour. If something selfish or damaging is beneficial to the individual at the expense of someone else, then the rules must be changed to even it back out.
Without dropping volumes of research, you can derive this intuitively. Think about how people respond in disasters. Running into danger to save strangers is common for things like floods or bystanders trying to save someone in a car crash. Prosocial is the norm.
These days extreme selfishness is an indicator of autistic spectrum disorder.
So when you pivot everything around selfishness what you in practice do is reward people with a certain flavor of autism and those who have that learned behavior. For example, Elon Musk, Richard Sackler, Adam Nuemam, Sam Bankman Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Martin Shkreli, Mark Zuckerberg...
Selecting for those traits exclusively to administer the public commons sounds fairly dangerous
On the one hand, asd people are everywhere including in positions of power.
However, if you had a system which, by design, considers a subsection of asd people as the only ones qualified to hold power, you would be missing out on the contributions of everyone else which we should be including, you know, as a virtue of democracy.
To circle back around, the premise that people are fundamentally selfish is what's being rejected. The reality is (some small minority of) people behave in ways that might be considered fundamentally selfish and they've been thoroughly studied by behaviourists and psychologists.
Are they?
Forgive the suspicion, it's just aside from Zuckerberg and Musk the rest of the list you specifically named in the GP comment aren't on the autism spectrum, so I'm finding this line of reasoning a little dubious.