If you assume the position that politicians are inherently evil, having them do their lucrative activities publicly is better than having things happen under the shadows.

The problem is public scrutiny. We don't scrutinize this behavior enough. Where is the outrage?

Is it? The last four years seemed like impunity under constant scrutiny.

> The last four years seemed like impunity under constant scrutiny.

Are you referring to the scandal ridden Administration where many officials went down in disgrace before the Administration itself was defeated?

That's one way to look at it. My take is that the corruption became so brazen and insidious that the political class had to make some symbolic sacrifices.

It's as if we had 100 "[visible] units of corruption" per year before the last administration, with 1 or 2 lost to enforcement or scapegoating and afterwards, we had 200 "units" per year with 10 lost to enforcement or scapegoating. Sure, it went from 1-2% to 5% which is enough to drown out everything else in 24/7 cable newsrooms but in absolute terms, the cost/damage/perception of corruption doubled. (Speaking in abstract terms to illustrate an opinion, not real data)

Why would we assume they are “evil”? We disincentivize bad behaviour (in terms of societal impact) all the time. For example, automotive laws don’t assume all vehicle owners are “evil”.

Not evil. Conflict of interest.

No, there's an evil tradeoff, and a non-evil tradeoff.

One of the choices in the conflict of interests is bad.

Or only allow politicians to buy shares in index funds of US companies so they aren’t biased towards any individual company whose stock they hold.

Even this is a conflict of interest. They could sell out the long term interest of the country in the short term interest of large businesses via any number of levers they control, e.g. harmful deregulation.