Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do.
No. I do not recommend it. But the thought experiment is interesting.
In the totality of all politicians out there that you have an opinion about, which fraction of them do you like, in terms of thinking they are the right person for the job? Do you think this fraction would improve with that opt-in scenario implemented?
It is repeated often, but is this really true?
Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion - and I don't think that you can increase that factor, just with throwing more money on them. Then you maybe just get more smart people, who are in it for the money and use their smarts and cunning to extract even more money. I think politicians should want that job, because they primarily feel the call to achieve something bigger.
So a adequate payrise is alright in my opinion, but I don't want the top managers who run a big compony for profit to also run states. As states are (or should not be) profit orientated, but to serve the greater good of its people.
These folks really are in fact deplorable and you need to appeal to at least a substantial minority of awful idiots to be elected president or if on team red most of them.
This is why every Republican president in half a century has been an embarrassment and every democratic relatively conservative because nothing else flies here and upping the ante won't help.
If I look around at (a) politicians and (b) people I respect for traits needed in politicians, then those sets are not fully but largely disjoint.
> Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion
There are other necessary traits though. Empathy. Diplomacy. The ability to compromise. Keeping an eye on the big picture. Current processes don't always select for those traits and there are tons of BS-ers and populists out there while I see people with the desirable traits outside politics and not having any desire to get involved. Putting a camera over their head 24/7 is not going to improve that.
Decisions that are made in good faith from average people would be so much better than anything we experience today, its almost comically absurd. The decision-making process including all talks being recorded and publically available would also be a massive factor to restore trust in politics.
Citation needed. Actually, a lot of citations needed.
When's the last time you spoke to an "average Joe" ? The average joe can't even make the right decisions regarding their own life and health, and is probably struggling to keep their family together and make ends meet.
What in the world makes you think they are qualified to make decisions on behalf of millions of constituents? I would drop dead before I let someone like that be my voice in politics.
> Decisions that are made in good faith from average people would be so much better than anything we experience today, its almost comically absurd.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, none is provided.
> Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do.
That's an interesting 0-100% (eclipse all possible free speech possibilities!) imaginary scenario. I don't subscribe to it.
In the novel it is extremely disruptive, but perhaps that is what is needed.
I do suspect that having a hot spouse and active sex life would become a significant advantage when running.
"This guy fucks."
If history teqches something is that the more of those, the more corruption and handing of favors and "legal corruption" pops up.
It is not by chance. It is just bc of how incentives are aligned. Those incentives, IMHO, can only be destroyed by strong deregulation and privatization. I dnt know how much of it but certainly a country should not be 45-50% or more GDP going public. Besides that centralized planning (we r going towards that) is usually super inefficient. So it is also a technical problem.
More when the peoople to arrange budgets do not pay a penalty even for their corruption in many cases, let alone for their management mistakes. Lagarde is still there and she gets 400.000 eur per year and took the decisios that made us go to these levels of inflation...on top of that she was involved in a corruption case that prescribed (not sure is the appropriate term in english, translated from spanish) I am no economist but I knew what would happen very likely... do they really pull our leg? I think so honestly.
Corporations are greedy, but they operate in a world where it is hard for them to enrich themselves without enriching others too.
Not that I am defending corrupt politicians, I just really don't know what to do about this, and looking at all the bad things corporations do i can't comprehend how they would suddenly become good when even less regulated than they already are
They do not improve your life objetively, usually they do not pay for the price of them when there is a mistake but get benefits from trafficking favors.
That would be fine if you had hundreds of CEOs competing in a market. Unfortunately they tend to merge and create monopolies. And some people salute this because of the growth at all costs mindset.
What else in nature grows at all costs? Oh right, cancer.
If there is benefit in a regulation, the person imposing it is not the person paying the negative outcomes of it. Never. So no, CEOs competing cannot get more than what they generate unless they distort the market in some way.
Now wait, let not be too hasty here. We should whiteboard this out. There are a lot of moving parts, and shutting down an idea too soon, would be wrong.
So to start, uh, just wondering, which politicians? Also, what would they be wearing?
Again, only asking for an accurate framing here.
I'm more worried about the fact that humans are, collectively at least, so hypocritical.
For the following examples, bare in mind that neither I nor the general public understand the actual laws, so any nits you pick need to be the kind that even a non-lawyer will accept:
I'm old enough to remember Clinton being impeached for lying about his affairs, and yet Republicans (collectively) are defending Trump for lying about affairs.
Or vice versa, Trump's classified documents at home vs. Biden's.
Probably the same elsewhere, but I don't trust that I'm not part of the problem with regard to UK politics (where I'm from), and my German isn't good enough to pay attention to what's happening where I now live.
Humans are violent too. If we tried as hard to train it out of people we'd make good progress.
The old Ted Kennedy maneuver
On both sides. It's all theater like WWE. You have the good guy and you have the heel. Each side has their own story with this format.
This is fundamental to loss aversion and compromise. There was never a "before." Open "negotiations" reward posturing, not compromise.
I also challenge the notion that higher pay leads to less corruption. If so, then why are Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Norway ranked higher in the corruption perception index[1], when they are paid much, much less annually (especially Finland)[2]?
[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022 (https://archive.ph/fabjP)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_salaries_of_heads_of_s... (https://archive.ph/XGbpO)
Of course it's hard to find the "actual corruption" figures, but that doesn't mean the perceptions index is of any value.
These are surveys, so there's a limit to how reliable their results can be. However, I find surveys are a pretty good start when you need to get a general idea on how something does and you can't just measure it. How you value that is up to you, that's why I quote it in my comment.
But on this particular index, I strongly suspect it is simply continuing existing biases. It's the thing people quote and by quoting it you get reinforce next year's rankings. Plus it's the kind of thing nobody can ever verify due to its nature.
On a side note, it might be interesting to see the evolution of this index over the years for any given country; that might lead to interesting conclusions on the bias confirmation you're talking about!
A horrifyingly large amount of UK political decision-making that should be minuted is instead carried out secretly on whatsapp.
If a politician votes for a law that reduces the speed limit to 50mph then is caught speeding is that corruption?
I think corruption is when someone abuses their position of power. This isn't abuse they just violated their own rules.
If more laws were objective (like speeding) and politicians were as surveilled as everyone else it wouldn't be an issue.
Also speeding is a bad example since the cops let people off all the time
> Also speeding is a bad example since the cops let people off all the time
That's why I said "and surveilled".
If at the same time they are breaking the law they created - that is corruption. For the people prosecuted for said crime with trials pending, it is information that is useful for them to know that the lawmaker conducted themselves in this manner.
That is, who's collecting kompromat on UK ministers, and for what purpose, and in exchange for what? (It's the press, isn't it)
Yes. Once one meets a journalist or two, you become aware that every scandal that comes to light was known by everyone for a long time.
There is someone else, however, the Whip. While the end recipient would ultimatley be the press, the power they hold is by collecting up little secrets like which Prime Minister was having an affair with their Chancellor ...
https://www.politicalite.com/exclusive/dirty-dossier-full-li...
2. The corruption of EU politicians is a major concern. If they think so little of privacy that they are willing to vote for laws like this, then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all. Corruption in government is one of the most damaging things happening in our society, and total surveillance would make it easier to detect & prove when they are lying.
Yes. I never said otherwise.
> then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all
That's the funny bit: they won't. They - and their family - will have the same if they use the same platforms. Which is why I firmly believe this isn't about corruption, this is about false beliefs and zealots who genuinely believe the internet and open communication is bad.
See, I can make up truly stupid neologisms as well. But at least mine isn't an effort to subvert foundational democratic norms.
Because unequal application of the law isn't law.
Whataboutism's necessity increases as the parties and potential charges under scrutiny are ever more alike.
In Whataboutism's novel sense, it is a brain-dead effort to try to get away using the law as a politicized cudgel.
You can tell by the need to invent a new word in order to describe an old concept.
Insofar as their is not any legal jeopardy involved, my explanation still applies however adjusted.
I mean those systems are already in place, at a minimum you'd have to argue they're ineffective or not as intrusive. And your hyperbole is not doing you any favours on that front.
Nobody I know would run for state office. They pay poorly. You have to work in the state capitol, which in most state's is awful. You lose your privacy. And for what, a marginal legislative role?
The historic benefit was pride. But with nihilism in vogue and trust in government low, that reward is non-existent. Our intelligent and ambitious don't aim for public office. (It even feels trite to call it public service.) That's a problem.
I have friends who ran for and won local and federal offices. I specifically called out state because it’s min-maxing the power-honor trade-off.
No, they become lobbyists instead. They have more power as they are the ones controlling the elected officials.
>That's a problem.
Humans are not angels, and we should not build systems that hold out some unrealistic expectation that they are.
Too often politicians are viewed as "saviors of the people" only shortly before they become "corrupt villains".
If we want to attract competent public minded people, we need to do a lot of deep thinking and system design to get there.
<personal pain point>
One good place to start is to get rid of this idea that every citizen's input is equally informed, sane, reasonable, actionable, legal, or thoughtful.
In a democracy, every person hopefully is afforded certain rights, such as due process and free speech, but this does not mean what you say is "free from consequences". The corollary is that not all ideas have to be given equal consideration. Some people say batshit crazy things sometimes, and frankly, these kinds of comments make life hell for many public servants. School boards come to mind.
Speaking, personally, I would like to be a public servant, in some regard (again), but I don't think we have realistic processes in place to really gather thoughtful feedback from the public. Until we do, public servants have to deal with a lot of informed nonsense.
I think software developers and UX people might not realize how skilled and motivated we are at building systems that actually work. I'm not saying that we build the right thing all the time. But so many government processes are fundamentally broken in terms of information processing. I'm not saying that they are broken by e.g. the tropes like "lazy people in government". I'm saying that the systems are (anti) designed (or evolved) in such a way that they're so painful that driven people get driven out.
If you think of a government as a way of processing citizen input in a way that is consistent with budget constraints and laws, it seems that many government agencies are not built using the principles that so many of us take for granted: system design, failure analysis, testing. This isn't just government problem, of course ... it is characteristic of large organizations of all kinds.
Democracy does not function well when too many people are simultaneously uninformed and yelling. This crowds out informed people trying to have a discussion.
</personal pain point>
I would vote yes.
Beware the peculiar human creature who craves attention from strangers.
If we required politicians to stream their lives 24/7, then the unintended consequence would be a government run exclusively by Instagram influencers who already stream their lives 24/7. I get your point about sunlight on secrets. But limiting our governance to the pool of people I see on TikTok seems like a high price to pay.
(This is just a 2023 rephrasing of the age-old concern of electing someone willing to be a politician.)
For example, if a country wants to implement the installation of state-owned anti-harassment "spyware" on their citizens phones, then this would first apply to politicians and those who work for the government, like anyone employed in a city hall or the traffic authority (normal citizens working there) or the like. This would run for 5 years, while citizens have the right to attempt to hack these systems without repercussions, in order to ensure that the security is up to the highest standards.
If after those 5 years the politicians and government employees are ok with it, if no major security concerns exist and the benefit has shown to be an obvious one, then it could be up for debate to implement this new technology.
I fear your carveout would quickly become an "Inner Party" situation, with those with real power declaring themselves exempt due to "national security" reasons. Imagine then that anyone in any position of authority but not real power would be subject to the surveillance as an "Outer Party" member.
I get that the intent is to show the people in charge the negative consequences of such policies, but I don't think that's the worst that could come of this.
Fallacy =/= thing I don’t like.
Any law voted yes by a politician would have:
A 6mo cool off period, and in that interim periodthe following would apply: the law in question would be Tripled (3x) and both ways (I.e. retroactive and future) to the elected officials, his immediate parents, sons, and siblings, as soon as the law is passed.
So if they pass a tax increase, the entire tax applies immediately to their family before it applies to the public.
Same would be surveillance. Same for healthcare changes. OR draft etc. They would eat their kill.
Its about time no?
Any regulatory body unelected chief + deputy should be subject to the same rules with a tidy bonus: agency rules would also impact the portfolio (materiality can be set at say FV in excess of 300% poverty line), or business relationships past + present for the "czars" and family members.
So If you want to run FDIC and want to make rules for banks, thats swell, but those rules will apply to bank X where your brother works, AND to bank Y where you were CEO. The new rule would apply to those banks first, the changes would be tripled, AND that would be applied retroactively.
Have fun with that revolving door!
We should also start to judge them based on outcomes rather than pointless metrics like GDP. How much did poverty decrease during your governments? How about crime? Life expectancy? And so on.
Government is NOT a job. Government is Public Service. Emphasis on 'service'
If you are not ready to do your service or duty, you are not fit to work in government.
The honor and duty of being a king came with the downside of the risks (beheading) to you and to your royal family, if you did a particularly bad job.
Current government officials have all the upside (revolving door) with almost zero downside. Some plebs break into congress and they get their pants in a jiffy.
We need to make them accountable. Them, and their families.
Yes that's exactly what I said. How about we forbid them from ever trading in stocks or participate in any investment where they might even have a remote conflict of interest?
I feel that would be the best way to keep crooks like Pelosi out of politics.
> Them, and their families.
This is nonsense but you must hate politicians apparently. I don't, I hate corruption.
I hate the kind of people it attracts.
We dont need politicians. We do need statemen.
I think you live fantayland if you think restricting their investment options will result in less politicians. Whats simply going to happen is that they will shift their activities to other income avenues. Less stock trading. More board jobs and speaking fees. The river of corruption keeps flowing even if in a different direction.
Instead, id like less incentives to corruption. That means eat what you kill. Id like more lincolns that take tremendous personal risk to themselves and their families, and declare wars against global superpowers, to then "close shop" and go back to their farm to retire.
Instead we have pelosis, mccains advancing the war lobby, or obamas making bank on "speaking fees"
Stock prohibition wont do a thing. You need to cut the incentive to sell favors. You need to re-introduce risk.
Workers who actually deal with confidential/personal information on citizens are the ones with the privilege to work without such monitoring.
"Given that political corruption is rife in European countries, with great detriments to the healthy function of government, all politicians in positions where they may be engaging in corrupt behavior must submit to 24-7 audio and video surveillance, which will be piped over public platforms for crowdsourcing of corruption detection. All personal communications of politicians and of government bureaucrats will become matters of public record for the same reason. Since we cannot trust a corrupt head of government to investigate their own corruption, or one of their underlings, this kind of public exposure of all politicians and bureaucrats is the only reasonable, rational solution to the problem of endemic government corruption in the EU."