If you’re holding elected office or have other regulatory/lawmaking powers you should only be permitted to hold index funds, or preferably you should have to move all your investments into a blind trust. Then there’s little chance you’re benefiting personally from inside info
Down this path is the requirement that politicians be independently wealthy, so that we can require them to earn no money and take no money-related actions, as those all risk corruption.
For lots of jobs your ability to trade in stocks is restricted. For example when I worked in the securities division of Goldman there was a restricted list of stocks that I was not allowed to own (because we were publicly doing something for them) and then I had to send all my trades through the employee trading desk because they had another list which was the restricted list where the deals weren't public yet so say we were going to be advising XYZ corp on a potential takeover of MNO corp. Only the people on that deal team would know anything about it, so XYZ and MNO stock wouldn't be on the restricted list but if I tried to buy or sell either of those stocks in my personal account I wouldn't be allowed. And there were other restrictions as well.
When I worked for a software company I wasn't allowed to trade in any stock of any of our clients or prospective clients and I had to sign a thing saying I wasn't going to trade based on any client information that was disclosed to me in the course of doing business with the client. etc
These kinds of restrictions are absolutely normal in business. Additionally, in other countries, politicians don't have this sort of carve-out on insider trading laws. This wouldn't be some kind of slippery slope. For example in the UK, members of parliament have to publish their financial interests to avoid these kinds of conflicts https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/contents22...
I kind of think that lawmakers should have to live off of the median income of the area people governed, so that in order to improve their own finances, they have to improve the situation for everyone.
Politicians should be all tax paid. There should be some entry requirements based on skills and abilities rather than connections/tenure/etc same as everything else.
Campaigns should be paid for with tax money with a strict limit for every candidate and harsh penalties for any under the table bullshit.
Corporations that would nominally donate can just not. And we can fucking tax them appropriately and stop them and their C levels tax dodging at every available opportunity.
The way things are at the moment, democracy is really just a corporation/business, isn't it? Pretty sure all of this is driven by apathy though, the average voter doesn't really care enough about these issues + humans are too easy to manipulate into race/class/etc wars to divide voters and distract them from thinking about the real issues - but the only reason they're so easy to distract is because we're all so self serving; people don't care so long as they can vote for the "team" that says they hate the people they hate.
> Campaigns should be paid for with tax money with a strict limit for every candidate and harsh penalties for any under the table bullshit.
> Corporations that would nominally donate can just not.
In Brazil campaigns are funded with taxpayer money, there are very strict rules for donations to election campaigns and donations from corporations aren't allowed. This is the theory but for real nobody gives a damn about the rules, corporations donate outrageous amounts behind the scenes and politicians do whatever they want. It is a clown show.
Alternately, strengthen democracy: roll back the clock on money-as-speech, restore fairness doctrine, make publicly financed campaigns the norm, implement RCV (executives) & PR (assemblies), etc, etc.
