Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs.
If you make part of the job requirements that you sacrifice your retirement and financial well being for the good of the country you’re just targeting a type of politician you wish existed, not real people.
> I'd hope that if they were required to live off of their (rapidly depreciating) savings and income
The problem with your line of thinking is that “they” is not a fixed set of candidates. If you forced them to have “rapidly depreciating” financial states to take the job, you’d lose a lot of candidates. I know you’d like to imagine they’d be replaced by perfect utopian candidates who only have your best interests in mind, but in reality if you make people financially desperate they’re actually more likely to look for ways to commit fraud for self-benefit. Imagine the desperate lawmaker watching their family’s retirement “rapidly depreciate” who gets a visit from a lobbyist who can get their kid a sweet $200K/yr do-nothing job if they can just slip a little amendment into a law.
The populist movement to punish lawmakers is self-defeating.
One objection could be this: but what if we hire unqualified people. The counterargument: do you think are current legislators are more or less qualified than an average person?
Another objection: but what if they don’t want to do it? Counterargument: when a juror does not want to be on a case, they are almost always dismissed from it. Doesn’t mean you get to skip jury duty, just that you don’t get to do that one.
One last one: this will disrupt those people’s lives. Counter argument: what Congress is and isn’t doing right now is disrupting everyone’s lives as are lobbyists and special interest groups.
Something similar has been done in Ireland with their assemblies. And I do think that if you cannot convince 535 randomly selected average citizens that a law should be passed, that law is probably not worth passing.
Democracy is a terrible form of government. It’s just that it is about 5x better than anything else we have invented so far. Doesn’t mean we should stop looking for a better system.
In modern times, sortition sometimes shows up in some deliberative democracy proposals.
The US government could not be managed by Athenian sortition any more than it could be by Athenian direct democracy -- the citizenry is too different, the questions too complex.
However, just as the Romans evolved their original Athenian-style direct democracy into representative democracy as their empire grew and became more heterogeneous, sortition has similarly evolved into deliberative democracy.
There is no historical precedent for our democratic system. Not Romans, Greeks, or 13 colonies. Why cite them?
Nobody has ever had a system with 300 million people having almost direct voting while simultaneously having no definition of a citizen besides “born here”.
I’m skeptical. The Trump/Fetterman/RFK phenomenon is the fruit of this democracy, not an unlikely aberration.
Does the average citizen even understand discounted cash flows or opportunity cost? And not to mention legal concepts I’m ignorant of.
I don’t see why lowering the quality of candidates by 10x would improve things.
I admire your optimism but saying it doesn't make it so.
We elect people able to convince others they should be elected. Often that means they possess the ability to convince others they have the skills, knowledge, and expertise you describe.
If you think that's the same thing as actually having skills, knowledge, and expertise, well, I have bad news for you...
Most random people off the street would be as capable as a US senator if they spent decades doing it.
https://www.kennedy.senate.gov/public/2025/9/kennedy-calls-f...
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/26/politics/james-inhofe-sno...
Or an even older one: https://rollcall.com/2018/02/16/flashback-friday-a-series-of...
We are definitely not sending our brightest.
That’s not an ordinary person even if we think his health views are dumb.
got into Harvard
(Cannot resist the legally blonde reference)
I’m not saying that makes them great. But if you want to see the pool of average citizens walk into a Walmart or DMV outside the Bay Area.
These random people will have to rely on experts a lot for knowledge they lack on any topic, because the world is complex. Now, these experts can be biased, bought, influenced etc. Or be accused of being in some sort of "Deep State" if you're into that.
But then again, this can already be the case, now I counter-countered myself.
If you wanted an alternative system: you could always have a professional group of law writers and a professional group of law opposers try to present arguments to a large assembly of law jurors. If they can’t get 2/3rds majority on a law, it doesn’t pass. This is better than something like direct democracy where everyone votes on an issue because you can’t get the voters’ attention on any one thing for more than a few minutes or a few hours at the most (except a small fraction for whom it is their life for a while). In this law jury setup you can properly brief them.
You could have some other body of professional governors who do things like emergency resolutions and maybe basic budget stuff but anything beyond that goes to the assembly for approval. You could create a new assembly as often as every 6 weeks and process a batch of laws at once so that you really rotate out the jurors before they can be influenced. And selection of law writers and law opposers can be something that is reviewed by this kind of assembly too, or just some large pool of professionals who are chosen at random for any given period of time and given the power to present before the assembly. A lot of options here for how to amortize bad behavior such that over the long haul it averages out to close to zero.
The legislature, however, is not there just to nod its head when they think something is a good idea and voting no when it's not. Even if we were to create a space for exactly that, all we've done is push the fallibility to those who are doing the work to write and revise law--but now they're pitching to those off the streets who don't know anything about governance! If anything, lay congresspeople would magnify, not reduce, the problems we have with our current system.
If we had national assemblies by sortition every 2 years, I would worry that the the tail (the current structure of Congressional support staff) would wag the dog. A better system would need to be designed to enable good decision-making.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/350541328/watch-national-le...
My sense is that people who advocate for sortition find it attractive not because they believe that the average citizen is more intelligent or better informed than the average career politician, just less corrupt.
Setting aside whether that's even true, I'm not sure whether it would be better to live in a country run by honest idiots or corrupt experts.
If anyone doesn't like that number (435), there's already a constitutional amendment to bump it up to 6000ish. It's been ratified by 12 states, so only 26 more needed. Call your state legislator today and ask why they're not ratifying it.
(In seriousness, they'd be forced to explore other solutions, possibly even regional capitols with some sort of high-tech teleconferencing. Anything that decentralizes and claws back power from DC can't be a bad thing if you ask me.)
More, obviously. Almost a third of the US House and half the Senate are lawyers. Less than three tenths of a percent of Americans have a JD.
But also have you see some of the laws written by them? I am not saying we need to dumb it down, but the fact that an average person who is governed by these laws cannot comprehend these laws is probably not the most desirable quality in a legal system.
Holding index funds seems reasonable (Total Stock Market, S&P 500)... not a huge sacrifice imo
I am wondering why i don't hear anything like: if a church or group representing a church get involved with politics, through lobbying or any other type of means, their tax free status is revoked and they are treated like a normal entity.
it seems like a similar type of thing that in my eyes at least, is a no brainer, but is just as likely to be chopped down because of how our current system functions.
I see this argument a lot, but I think it treats people as uniform input-output machines. Singapore is successful in this regard because of much more severe and very real penalties for corruption, and because not "everyone does this". You can't bribe immoral people into behaving morally, because in the absence of morals they have no incentive not to just take your bribe and keep doing what they're doing.
A significant number of corrupt public "servants" are multi-millionaires, no amount of money will ever be enough for them.
The only acceptable leader is someone who was born so rich that he leads as a hobby.
So insider trading is not a thing among Singapore's ruling class?
e.g.,
Singapore PM annual salary: ~$1.63 million USD
Singapore President salary: ~$1.14 million USD
Personally I never considered a career in the public sector mostly because there is an expectation in my country (US) that I would be poorly compensated.
Congressmen get paid 170K/year, get pension after only 5 years (MTG is leaving just after she becomes eligible), plus they only work like 6 months in a year, right? Not sure about healthcare and other benefits. While they can't get rich on this salary, this does seem pretty decent salary and perks, right?
How do other democracies solve this problem?
EDIT: You will notice a lot of talk about high pay. It's important to note that this is not without major punishment for financial mismanagement. You can't have one without the other, it's not just a question of giving politicians a bigger trough to put their snout in.
> Countries like Singapore already figured out that if you pay public servants very well you can attract high quality people to government jobs.
If all the options on the ballot are scoundrels, which seems to often be the case, you're kinda stuck.
The current lag timed reporting requirement is a decent start, but fact of the matter is that it still allows Reps to take advantage of insider knowledge to profit and thereby basically be bribed in circuitous ways not really all that different than a mobster/teamster accidentally leaving behind a suitcase of cash after they dinner party the politician invited him to, just even more obfuscated and structured.
I'd be okay letting them invest in S&P500 and that's about it.
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-advances-pelosi-act-to-...
Or another way to state my point: voters are getting exactly the politicians they voted for. There is no majority-constituency that seeks a different group - because majority voters already have the ballot power to select different politicians.
As Milton Friedman said:
What is important is not the particular person who is elected President or the party he belongs to. I have often said we shall not correct the state of affairs by electing the right people; we’ve tried that. The right people before they’re elected become the wrong people after they’re elected. The important thing is to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. If it is not politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either.Federal US politician incentives are pretty much designed for corruption.
They shouldn't be allowed to trade stocks. When you do so, corruption is inevitable. It should be an expected price of public service that you remove yourself from most other ambitions.
I'd hope that if they were required to live off of their (rapidly depreciating) savings and income, like most Americans, they might consider some of their legislative choices differently.