One of the problems with "getting money out of politics" is that money is only one form of power, and it is the one that is easiest to measure directly and objectively.
So you get rid of the money.
Alright, so a girl shows up in Senator Phil McCracken's room every night. Nobody says she's there on behalf of anyone. Nobody says there is a deal. Nobody even says there is anything unusual going on. Suddenly, the toilet industry gets huge concessions.
"Oh, but he would have to report that."
Report what? A girl showing up at his room? There is no code of ethics under which you have to report every time you encounter a girl unless it is somehow connected to your official duties, and we just established that everyone involved says it isn't.
This is the modernist problem in miniature. You focus on money because money is countable, measurable, objective, and therefore controllable. But eliminate the measurable form of power and you have not necessarily eliminated power. You may have just pushed it into favors, access, sex, status, jobs, prestige, protection, relationships, and other things that are subjective, indirect, and extremely difficult to measure.
Doesn't mean you can't try to reduce corruption, it just means you're going to need to stop thinking like that modernist I'm criticizing to accomplish it.
And this is also why the one world government a lot of people think they want makes me nervous. They think it'll improve things, maybe because they imagine such a government doing what they want it to do. But what if you get your one world government and it becomes the one world empire under Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin?
The more power you put in one place, the more valuable it becomes to corrupt even a tiny piece of it. A government with authority over the entire world would control decisions affecting tens of trillions of dollars in economic activity. Capture a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of those decisions and you can make a fortune, potentially over and over again. And this is hardly a problem unique to capitalism: historically, wherever governments have concentrated enough power, people close to that power have found ways to turn access, favor, office, protection, and privilege into wealth.
Imperial China provides an old example of the same phenomenon. Its political culture often treated merchants as socially inferior to scholar-officials, but that did not make the competition for wealth and power disappear. It redirected ambition toward the bureaucracy. Wealthy families poured resources into educating their sons for the imperial examinations, because entry into the governing class brought status, influence, and opportunities that mere commercial success could not. The market for power had not disappeared; people had simply learned to buy into it with education, connections, and years of preparation instead of treating private enterprise as the only route upward.
Banning the obvious ways of buying influence does not remove the incentive to buy influence. It just changes what people use to pay.
So you get rid of the money.
Alright, so a girl shows up in Senator Phil McCracken's room every night. Nobody says she's there on behalf of anyone. Nobody says there is a deal. Nobody even says there is anything unusual going on. Suddenly, the toilet industry gets huge concessions.
"Oh, but he would have to report that."
Report what? A girl showing up at his room? There is no code of ethics under which you have to report every time you encounter a girl unless it is somehow connected to your official duties, and we just established that everyone involved says it isn't.
This is the modernist problem in miniature. You focus on money because money is countable, measurable, objective, and therefore controllable. But eliminate the measurable form of power and you have not necessarily eliminated power. You may have just pushed it into favors, access, sex, status, jobs, prestige, protection, relationships, and other things that are subjective, indirect, and extremely difficult to measure.
Doesn't mean you can't try to reduce corruption, it just means you're going to need to stop thinking like that modernist I'm criticizing to accomplish it.
And this is also why the one world government a lot of people think they want makes me nervous. They think it'll improve things, maybe because they imagine such a government doing what they want it to do. But what if you get your one world government and it becomes the one world empire under Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin?
The more power you put in one place, the more valuable it becomes to corrupt even a tiny piece of it. A government with authority over the entire world would control decisions affecting tens of trillions of dollars in economic activity. Capture a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of those decisions and you can make a fortune, potentially over and over again. And this is hardly a problem unique to capitalism: historically, wherever governments have concentrated enough power, people close to that power have found ways to turn access, favor, office, protection, and privilege into wealth.
Imperial China provides an old example of the same phenomenon. Its political culture often treated merchants as socially inferior to scholar-officials, but that did not make the competition for wealth and power disappear. It redirected ambition toward the bureaucracy. Wealthy families poured resources into educating their sons for the imperial examinations, because entry into the governing class brought status, influence, and opportunities that mere commercial success could not. The market for power had not disappeared; people had simply learned to buy into it with education, connections, and years of preparation instead of treating private enterprise as the only route upward.
Banning the obvious ways of buying influence does not remove the incentive to buy influence. It just changes what people use to pay.