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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

these are just edge cases that get a lot of media coverage. By in large, people in tech, law, finance , etc. are making a lot of money and while being ethical and hard-working. The fear that society is overflowing with opportunists who are just looting the system or getting by without work, is overblown. I understand the author's frustration, but incompetence, favoritism, lying (except perjury), and nepotism are generally not crimes, and very few people are able to get by without doing the necessary work. Also, plenty of non-famous people also engage in shitty behavior too but it's not newsworthy.

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But this article cites multiple examples from the highest levels of business and politics to make the point.

if you dig deep and long enough you will find examples for any group at all levels..

the examples he gives are weak. For example, Trump's hotels saw an increase in business after he became president. Is this a surprise or a bad thing, given all the media coverage he got? Of all the things we can fault trump on, is this the most damning, which was not even under his control?

This is a pretty good example of the Overton window moving. It used to be common for Presidents to divest direct control of their assets (e.g. Carter’s peanut farm). Trump never did that and it was a huge issue for many at the start of his presidency.

Never stopped being an issue of some magnitude to me. Sadly it was followed up with issues of much larger magnitude, resulting in a redefinition of “huge”. Which kind of makes your point about Overton windows.

So people are expected to liquidate their life holdings and give up their interests and businesses in order to hold a political office like President for a few years? Doesn’t that penalize potential candidates and limit the pool of people?

Seriously, what type of person is willing to run for office under these expectations? I don’t see a long line of Mother Theresa’s seeking office. People willing to accept the conditions of running for office are most likely so desperate for power that they are willing to do anything like upend their financial lives and submit to invasive and potentially embarrassing scrutiny. Are these the type of people we want to lead a country?

Yes, I think the requirements to hold literally the most powerful office on earth should be extraordinary. Realistically anyone who does it is set for life with five-figure speaking fees anyway so boohoo about their businesses.

Similarly, I think powerful people have always behaved as poorly as in the examples he mentioned. It's just that nowadays, data-driven traditional and social media uses the outrage to make money. This does unfortunately lead more people to think that cheating is OK, but I think for the most part, our systems do eventually work to correct that.

Certainly even the Founding Fathers had a lot of business entanglements that would lead one to seriously question whether they didn't have a conflict of interest (e.g., how much was Washington's decision to mount an army to secure the Ohio territory influenced by his own significant personal holdings there?). But it feels to me like at one point we had, to some extent, mastered this problem, and now we've moved away from even trying.

Probably. Maybe it didn't have that much of an impact on society because it wasn't known. E.g. in Germany during Covid-19 measures, multiple CDU politicians got caught doing shady deals with companies, either by having the state overpay for masks for a kickback, by pushing for emergency certifications for some tests (again for cash), and other corrupt behaviors.

This wouldn't be a large issue if nobody had known - even if the state had overpaid by half a billion, that's not even a day's worth of money. However, since it came out, there has been a massive loss of trust in politicians and public institutions. Those who doubted before now saw proof that it's all just a scheme, and others just lost a lot of trust.

We'll have to see whether anything happens beyond the accused promising to donate the proceeds, but I'm not holding my breath.

Sounds like the "Welfare queen" that people want to get all enraged about all over again.

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