He’s not alone: AOC and others have argued lawmakers should be paid more in order to protect against corruption and make the job more accessible.
He’s not alone: AOC and others have argued lawmakers should be paid more in order to protect against corruption and make the job more accessible.
If you want your politicians to be loyal to a country, you pay them. If you want them to be loyal to corporate interests, you let the corporations pay them. It is obvious the path the US has chosen. Contrast that with Singapore for an example of paying your elite government officials an actual salary and how corruption drops to zero.
You’re not wrong but it’s easy to mix up actual loyalty and being the highest bidder.
For many people it’s the exact same thing. And you absolutely cannot trust the public to vet candidates as has been proven over and over so only way to improve is to attract better candidates, and for that you need better pay.
We keep raising their salary. They keep getting worse.
It’s because the Supreme Court decided “money is speech”, which is so fucking stupid and logically flawed that it makes my head want to cave in.
“Speaking” is not subject to the rules of scarcity - given a supply of breathable air, water, and food, literally anyone could technically continue speaking indefinitely, both in a literal sense, as well as a written sense across various forms of transmission.
Using money under the auspices of “speech” IS subject to the rules of scarcity, and is a direct reflection of socioeconomic gaps in our society - that is, Musk or Zuck or Bezos or insert billionaire here have multiple orders of magnitude more “monetary speech” than pretty much anyone in the country - or, for that matter, anyone in the history of the human race.
That’s the same logic as prople saying we should keep the churches tax free, so they don’t interfere in politics, even thoigh they’re tax free now and already interfering with politics.
Not even close. Very poor strawman attempt. Tax the churches. They want to be non profits, take 100% of the profits.
Not really a strawman attempt, I just likened it to a very similar situation.
But if that’s what it takes to convince yourself that you’re right, sure.
Whereas in America, we could pay them millions and there’d still be constant grift. This country has lost any sense of accountability. Too goddamn individualist.
They make deer $100k a year and have so many subsidies like for housing and travel. We could pay them millions and they would still take bribes. The problem is our economic model that puts money over people and our social values that puts power over people. And Singapore still has corruption!