alt Hacker NewsI don't want people in congress as a career. Do it for at most 2 terms and get back to the real world. When that is the reality it means we cannot take away their ability to have stocks because when they return "to the real world" they will need that savings. Though while in office they should be limited to buying and selling from blind trusts and such things where they cannot know what happens except the economy in general. However if they own stock before it isn't fair to make them sell it: this is a really hard problem and there probably isn't an answer I will be happy with.
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> Do it for at most 2 terms and get back to the real world.
Guaranteeing they never get good at their job, and institutional knowledge keeps decaying.
We need to stop pretending that Congress or any of these elected positions don't require skills. I think to be a Congressperson you have to go to specific trade school--let's call it Congress U--graduate with high honors, serve in some other government capacity, and your grades are public record. Only then are you qualified to even run for election.
Democracy isn't about letting any random firebrand run things. Heck, we don't even let random firebrands install electricity.
Think through the downstream impact of term limits... where does the power accumulated by long-term congressmen go? My guess... it flows to either/all of career bureaucrats, lobbyists, or career congressional aides. Do we really want to cede more power to groups that are not elected (bureaucrats, lobbyists) or elected-by-proxy (aides)?
Doesn't that imply that everyone in Congress will be amateur at best at being congressman?
For reps, I’m okay with four terms for a total of eight years.
Less sure on senators.
But on the whole I agree with term limits for Congress.
The problem is getting the house full of lifers to agree to the real swamp of government (it’s Congress).
Since they are supposed to be serving their country and not seeking personal gain, their interests should be aligned with those of the whole country. As a condition of taking office, they should surrender their entire stock portfolio to a government custodian in exchange for a federally-held broad market index fund. While in office, they are free to sell from that fund if they need the money and free to buy more of that, but no other securities. When they leave office, they are owed the present value of their index fund, and can repurchase whatever they want to. All of these could be made non-taxable events, so that if someone wants to just go back into the same positions they had, there isn’t any complication.
To me, the above seems slightly complex, but well worth undertaking in order to stop this blatant and shameless corruption.
As we’ve seen with the current president, though, it’s much more difficult when they own and control whole businesses instead of just fungible securities. To be fair to the president, there isn’t really any reasonable way to get rid of his massive conflicts of interest besides having a pre-inauguration IPO for all his companies and retaining 0 shares - and his family retaining nothing too. But that’s a bigger problem that probably cant be solved.
Stocks though, it would be easy, they just don’t want to solve it.
I would use straight up sortition rather than voting for congress. Propel people into the job from obscurity, by the time they've learned how to game the system it is time to leave.
yeah this is exactly it, there's no good way to prevent congress from sharing inside information to enrich people around them in the wake of personal bans... we just need term limits to reduce the surface area
Yeah, but that makes them susceptible to lobby groups. They offer the politicians cushy jobs after their political career in exchange for political services. Politician probably has to be a sustainable and well-paid career somehow.
> I don't want people in congress as a career. Do it for at most 2 terms and get back to the real world.
This means you want them to do a job for four years when it takes them two or three to learn how to do it.
> 't want people in congress as a career. Do it for at most 2 terms and get back to the real world.
How realistic is this though? Getting elected to Congress usually means having some other prior government experience, or your opponents attack you with "why would you give this person responsibility at a congressional level if they've never even worked in local politics?" Not to mention you need name recognition, a history in government that people can use to understand your values as acted, relationships in government to accomplish anything.
As I get older it seems that liberal democracy basically requires career bureaucrats to function. I'm very open to discussing other ways of organizing society, but if we're gonna do liberal democracy, seems this is the way.