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I think the most interesting aspect of Singapore's government is they pay government officials multimillion dollar salaries. This makes them very hard to bribe. If you think about the size of the budgets government officials have authority over compared to their salaries, the temptation to be bribed and thus be dominated by corporate interests is overwhelming. In Singapore the incentives are reversed. Any allegation of corruption risks a lost job. In other countries they would get fired and go to work at the companies that bribed them but in Singapore the private companies will have difficulty competing with their government salary, not to mention the prestige that comes with being a government official.

I would be in support of that being tried in the U.S, especially for senior level positions. It would probably save money in the long run.

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I've heard this theory quite a few times, but the fact that there is virtually zero low-level corruption (eg. cops asking for bribes) despite low-level public salaries being quite low doesn't jibe that well with this.

More disturbingly, despite that high pay there are regular reports of corruption in the highest ranks, only a few of which even see the light. Here's one particularly unedifying saga that only made the news because the head honcho of a government-linked charity, paid $600k/year plus stupidly generous expenses (fleet of 8 cars etc), was foolish enough to sue a state-owned newspaper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Kidney_Foundation_Sin...

They are ranked 7th best in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index which is just about the most objective measure of relative country corruption out there so you can't really objectively say that they are just as corrupt as everybody else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index#20...

Uh, I actually said is "there is virtually zero low-level corruption", which is entirely in line with that.

I'm just taking exception to the rather glib claim that high salaries eliminate corruption at higher levels, because quite clearly they do not, even in Singapore. But this is not the kind of thing that affects perceptions in day-to-day life, while the Malaysian cop asking for an on-the-spot fine or the Indonesian immigration dude finding a "mistake" in your visa does.

Bribery/favor system isn't usually for personal gain, its to pay for re-election campaigns. That's why we have this incredibly complex and huge political lobbyist system in the US.

Even someone worth millions can't personally pay out their own election campaign or just may not want to waste their personal funds.

>I would be in support of that being tried in the U.S, especially for senior level positions

Roughly 50% of Congress are millionaires with a median of about $3m. In other words, they're all fairly well off as-is.

> pay for re-election campaigns

In other words, the fact that the foundations of the political process depend heavily on money is what spoils the whole thing. Nothing will get fixed as long as that remains true.

Get money out of politics.

> Get money out of politics.

The only way to do that now is with a constitutional amendment. The Wolf PAC is working hard to get one passed and has actually succeeded in several states.

http://www.wolf-pac.com/effects_of_corporate_lobbying_take_a...

The "Wolf PAC"? Aren't they a subbranch of the New World Order?

So to preserve democracy, we must sacrifice freedom of speech?

we're (Australia) doing okay with the democracy thing, no explicit freedom of speech.

Plus, it depends if you define speech as "giving money to someone"

Even if you ban/regulate giving money to candidates, are you willing to ban the ability of citizens to buy ad time and say something political? Who defines what "political" is?

Would you ban:

An ad that promotes preserving a specific forest while there is a referendum about increasing environmental spending.

An ad that says the schools are falling apart and understaffed while an education millage is being voted on.

An ad that says you shouldn't be forced to buy healthcare while a candidate/party's platform is strongly tied to that policy.

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes. http://www.kulturstyrelsen.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/dokument...

The belief that money is 'speech' is a modern form of collective delusion - like the children's crusades back in the Dark Ages.

Later generations will look at it and will go "how was that even possible?"

You have freedom of the press. You just can't spend money on ink or paper.

If I didn't hear this so often in real life, I'd think it was a bad line in a cheesy dystopian movie.

I actually don't have a problem with newspapers printing whatever the hell they want. However I do have a problem with it, when it's broadcast television or radio which is explicitly (and necessarily) a government-mandated monopoly, and to a lesser extent cable television which is in most cases an effective monopoly due to various stupid policies at the federal, state, and municipal levels of government. Assuming we eventually shitcan net-neutrality, I will have the same reservations there, as well.

Basically, as long as there is no physical limit to the number of voices that can be heard (as with broadcast television), and the barriers to entry are reasonably low (unlike with cable television, and possibly internet in the near future), then absolute freedom of speech works very well. Otherwise, all you're left with is propaganda under cover of freedom of speech, and it fucking sucks.

> Get money out of politics.

How exactly do you propose to achieve that, though?

The problem is that political positions bestow power. People with money want that power, and I don't see how you can prevent them from using their money, directly or indirectly, to attain it.

You can make it harder -- the trend recently is to make it easier.

>Bribery/favor system isn't usually for personal gain, its to pay for re-election campaigns.

Like a corporate tax return, during a campaign you can write off a lot of seemingly personal expenses as campaign expenses.

Also, re-election IS personal gain.

> Bribery/favor system isn't usually for personal gain, its to pay for re-election campaigns.

You've missed a big part of the favor system if you aren't looking at where people who lose campaigns end up working and how well they are paid -- even after they've written off any future campaigns for public office.

That'd be a hard case to present to the public... "Politicians want a 20x salary raise so they will act more ethically."

Technically, unelected bureaucrats rather than politicians ... but yeah, equally as unappealing.

I think if you combine that with IT2000[0], it would be more of a "let's pay technocrats tons of money to build their vision of paradise".

[0] As per article, it is a law which mandated annual increases in productivity of 3-4%. So essentially this is officially sustained technology race.

With increasingly-replicated data that increasing seniority levels of leadership and simply the plain wealthy over-represent sociopathic and psychopathic traits when compared to the general population, I doubt the idea of paying government leaders more will move the corruption needle any appreciable amount. Generally, it seems the prevalence and diffusion of these traits is semi-stable depending upon the cohort or even industry (financial services, for example) under observation.

Note we're still talking about relatively small groups even so: single digit percentages at most is all I've seen for US population cohorts of various selection criteria. The positive takeaway is that in the US at least, while leadership overrepresents these traits, you are more likely to simply meet well-intentioned and honest leaders (or well-intentioned but ineffective) leaders than those who exhibit the aforementioned traits.

What paying government leaders more CAN pave the way clear for however, is for far less "privacy" of their daily lives, and far stricter anti-corruption regulations. Something along the lines of a bodycam streaming straight to a replicated digital vault, accompanied by rules like unexplained gaps in the stream are grounds for instant, unappeal-able, permanent dismissal with revocation of all retirement benefits, with the ability to let third parties also vault the encrypted streams if desired. If they're paid so much out in the open, then it will probably be easy to sell the voting public on keeping such "digital tabs" on the leadership. Still wouldn't prevent the corruption, but I'd be happy to root it out before it rots out the infrastructure from underneath us.

You could go some way to solving the problem by making all financial transactions public, no exceptions, with extremely severe penalties for attempted non-disclosure.

This suggestion often makes heads explodes, but some countries do something similar already.

The price of bribery/lobbying is related to (price to influence) * (number of officials). Instead of raising the price to influence by paying them more, I recommend raising the number of officials.

If congress had 10k members, bribing enough to get something passed would get quite expensive. (6320 would be the current min size of the US House of Representatives by the original method in the Constitution of at least 1 per 50k)

I guess that would raise costs to 6320/435 = 14.5x. At $1.6 million per seat [http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/how-much-does-...] you could buy congress for $10.1 billion. The federal budget is about $3800 billion, so... this seems like an attractive price if the congress you buy is willing to steer a few percent of the federal budget into your pocket.

In a country with a 16 trillion dollar GDP and a 3.5 trillion dollar budget how big would the salaries need to be to make our government officials incorruptible?

It's a bigger stakes game here in the USA.

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