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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

And their partners, parents, children, friends?

This problem looks unsolvable to me.

When you turn it into a binary "we need to stop them from absolutely sharing any privileged information" or all is lost, it's an unsolvable problem.

Alternatively a few achievable steps could make a large improvement:

- Force them to put everything into a trust that they don't have direct control over for the duration of their term vs. allowing them to make trades and disclosing it eventually.

- Have enforced laws on sharing information, and actually send people to jail a few times a year.

Skew the risk / reward. Let people think on if they want to go to prison.

> This problem looks unsolvable to me.

Elect only people with no living relatives, and execute them after term's end.

I vaguely remember some fantasy novel I've read many decades ago with this premise... The Goblin tower?

Sounds like a good way to elect leaders that have no disincentive for staring a thermonuclear war.

Ok, provision A: in the event of the thermonuclear war, the elected leader should be taken to a protected bunker, where he should be killed in the slowest and most painful way.

...assuming they're not already dead by then.

Plato's Republic[0] specified rules to minimise corruption opportunities. That's what comes to mind anyway.

Excerpt from [0]:

Socrates points out the human tendency to be corrupted by power leads down the road to timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny. From this, he concludes that ruling should be left to philosophers, who are the most just and therefore least susceptible to corruption. This "good city" is depicted as being governed by philosopher-kings; disinterested persons who rule not for their personal enjoyment but for the good of the city-state (polis). The philosophers have seen the "Forms" and therefore know what is good. They understand the corrupting effect of greed and own no property and receive no salary. They also live in sober communism, eating and sleeping together.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_(Plato)

You can just imprison their relatives for the duration of the mandate. And them keep them and their relatives imprisoned for another two years after the mandate is over. There's no need to kill anyone.

Quite a lot of historical nations had most civil administration operated by eunuchs, for exactly this reason. Obviously not foolproof, as eunuchs have friends and family, and probably not practical to implement today, of course :)

Maybe with that attitude :)

Part of solving the problem is legislation, part of it is cultural. If you don't have both, then sure, it's too hard.

I think the biggest part is enforcement, which is confounded by the fact that many of these politicians can pull strings for and against the people who are supposed to do the enforcement.

Is anyone at the SEC really going to use resources to piss off a congressperson by investigating whether their nephew's father-in-law used insider information when they made a certain trade?

Not if they have other cases they can spend their resources on which won't potentially hinder their own careers.

They prevent the family of employees of companies that host contests and sweepstakes from participating, don’t they?

That's more a "we're free to claw back the prize if we discover you ignored it" rule than anything else effective.

And the SEC monitors people's family if they work in a regulated role.

I work in financial services (mostly) as a consultant. All of my trades, and those of my partner, are monitored. The SEC has a data science team (Market Abuse Unit's Analysis and Detection Center) that specifically looks for insider trading using market data and generates leads for their enforcement division. The goal is to not "solve", but to disincentivize the casual offender and punish harshly the determined when detected.

Humorously, my trades and capital market activities are more regulated than Congressional representatives who have direct access to MNPI (material non public information), which I do not have access to. As this NPR piece alludes to, we should fix that.

Where I work, people in the front office can't trade in single stocks either. Funds only.

This is what insider trading laws do already. It's not a perfectly solved problem but it is problem with an existing solution.

Au contraire it's trivial. Or are politicians somehow invulnerable to the same things engineers are?

https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/comp7lr17243.htm

If only we had some sort of technology to monitor social networks and large amounts of data...

There is no technology that monitors trades of friends or family outside the US banking system.

Why else are there thousands of companies based in the Cayman Islands? It is to obscure the identity of the traders.

I mean, this isn't a new problem. If the kid of the CEO of BigCorp Ltd buys shares in MediumCorp Pty and then BigCorp buys MediumCorp the next day, the regulators will absolutely take an interest in that.

This is the case in banks, and where I work they're also not allowed to trade single stocks - funds, etfs etc only. If banks can manage, so can politicians.

We already have a definition for a politically exposed person.

If Kaiser Soze would have killed them, then their trades should also be restricted.

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