~Everybody is motivated by money or else not motivated at all. Money is potential energy for essentially any objective you might have, whether that's developing new tech or donating to charity. By cutting money out, you just select for the subset of people who are more motivated by power or status or who already have more money than they know what to do with.

Many if not most intelligent and skilled people are highly motivated by money, not just in pursuit of material comfort but security for their spouse, offspring, and extended family.

I am skeptical of an arrangement where those incentives are at odds with care for critical infrastructure like our political process.

That being said, the current arrangement makes it vastly more profitable to destabilize the economy and sell short than stabilize it and buy long, which is clearly unacceptable to me.

Not paying officials enough leads to bribery and corruption. Take away their avenue for insider trading, but let them make a healthy living off it in my opinion.

Agreed. One thing I appreciate about New Hampshire’s state congress is their pay is fixed at $100/year.

I don't think people that are electable are usually the kind of people that should be in congress. If you have the kind of personality and allegiances to be representing the common man, you can't get elected due to how that process works.

Sortition makes way more sense to me for something like a congress. You just end up with a random selection of the population.