I read once that originally, politicians were not paid by the government. Their only form of income was from the people that that person represented: if the constituents believed that the politician did a good job representing them, then it was up to the individual people to pay that politician what they believed s/he was worth.

I guess the idea was that if you don't do a good job, you don't get paid. On the other hand, if you don't pay the representative fairly, then they won't run the following year. "You get what you pay for".

Would this work in the grand scheme of things these days? I always think that there are too many 'key people' and too many companies with so much financial clout that the money they give would overshadow what the constituents would pay privately. The one saving grace there, I guess, is that at the end of the day, the person still needs to be voted back in...