People like the idea of cheap politics because it feels morally clean. If politicians are underpaid, the thinking goes, they must be serving for noble reasons. If the salary is modest, corruption must have less room to grow. It is an attractive fantasy and a bad way to design a state. In fact, is an elitist way and it leads to government by the rich, who can afford it.
Low-paid office does not produce moral purity, but filters out the lower classes from participating in office. The first filter is class. Public life becomes easier for the wealthy, the independently connected, the retired, the trust fund kids and the people whose households can absorb years of mediocre compensation. Everyone else has to ask a much uglier question first: can I afford to serve? A democracy that pays badly often just narrows who can plausibly participate.
The second filter is monetization pressure. Money does not leave politics because the official salary is low. It comes in through side doors. Future lobbying jobs. Board seats. Media contracts. Donor dependency. Consulting work after office. A legislator who spends years making himself useful to the industries he oversees and then walks into a lucrative post-office advisory role is not some random moral accident. The system has already taught him where the real compensation lives. At some point you have to pay the mortgage. There's some outrage going on about Mike Johnson mentioning that Congress members should be allowed to do insider trading:
Look, the guy sucks. He's a weak, pathetic weasel betting everything on Trump. But the point he makes is the symptom I'm talking about. We ALL want to own our houses, vacations abroad, good medicine, great education for our kids... Politicians too. This is not a post to have empathy on corruption, but rather on displaying how a higher salary gives opportunities to lower income people to come in and do a great job, while also taking care of themselves in the process without needing to perform blatant corruption
That is why the moral pride around underpaying politicians is so often backward. The state congratulates itself for austerity while preserving aristocratic access and encouraging "respectable" forms of corruption, such as insider trading. The politician who can afford low pay because he is already insulated is not more republican in spirit than the politician who needs a real salary. He is just better positioned to absorb the fake nobility of public sacrifice.
Singapore is the serious modern example people dislike because it makes the design logic too obvious. Often considered the Father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew's administration, chose to tie high ministerial compensation to talent attraction and anti-corruption goals. They pay their administration a lot more to ensure their brightest people at least consider public office, rather than private work. If you want strong people in government and you want them less tempted to hunt for hidden compensation, you will have to pay them to do so.
Salary does not solve everything, of course it does not. A corrupt society can pay officials well and remain corrupt. Enforcement matters. Transparency matters. Norms matter. But none of that cancels the simpler point. Compensation changes who can afford office and how badly officeholders need to monetize it indirectly.
Older British public life made the same point from the opposite direction. Politics carried the air of a gentleman's role partly because gentlemen were the people most able to live inside it. If office is not financially livable, office turns into either a hobby for the insulated or a bridge for the connected.
I know many politicians are a bunch of twats, in this system for themselves. I can see that, you can too. I'm not advocating for rewarding them, I'm advocating for a system that incentivizes lower classes to also seek to serve. A system that does not make it look like a sacrifice for your country, because, for the rich, there is no sacrifice since public office barely makes a dent in their bottom line.