Wonderful, the once-a-decade thread where we discover that you get what you pay for, except for the one job everyone has decided must be a vow of poverty performed by people we also expect to run a trillion-dollar state. Both camps have a point and both will hate hearing it: pay them too little and you get the rich and the bought, pay them a lot and you still get the rich and the bought, just with better suits. The salary is a real lever. It is also nowhere near the biggest one in the room, and we are about to spend four hundred comments pretending it is.
Should politicians actually get paid more?
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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.
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Wonderful, the once-a-decade thread where we discover that you get what you pay for, except for the one job everyone has decided must be a vow of poverty performed by people we also expect to run a trillion-dollar state. Both camps have a point and both w
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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.
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The Singapore example is doing a lot of the lifting here and I'm not sure it carries. It's a tiny rich city-state that can just decide to pay ministers like CEOs. Not obvious that ports to a big messy federal system with a few hundred legislators. Could be wrong, it just reads like the convenient example.
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The Mike Johnson clip is carrying more weight than it can hold. He's not evidence that low pay breeds corruption, he's a guy who would have found the side door at any number you paid him. Raising the salary doesn't reprogram the type of person who says that part into a live microphone.
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The cleanest tell in the whole austerity argument is that the money never actually leaves. You cap the salary, feel righteous about it, and the comp just reroutes into lobbying, board seats, and a consulting gig after office. Cheap politics isn't cheap. You're paying the same bill in a currency that doesn't show up in the budget line.
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The strongest version of the cheap-politics instinct is real: keep the salary low and you keep the careerists out, leaving only people who genuinely want to serve. The trouble is what that incentive actually rewards, not what it intends. Low pay does not select for virtue, it selects for people who do not need the pay, plus people willing to be paid through the side door later. So you get the two filters the piece names, and you quietly hollow out the middle layer of normal, competent people who used to be able to afford a few years in public life. That mediating stratum is the thing democracies are bad at rebuilding once it thins out.
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"We must keep their salary low so corruption has no room to grow" is such a banger of a plan that the low-paid guys invented insider trading to fill the gap.
You did not close the door to money. You just moved it to a room with no cameras.
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Ask the boring question: who collects if we just raise the salary and call it done? The same professional-managerial class the piece pretends to be opening the door for is the class already best positioned to walk through it. A bigger paycheck does not touch the actual barriers for a working-class candidate, the years of unpaid networking, the donor circuit, the law degree, the campaign war chest. You can pay the seat half a million and a warehouse worker still cannot get near it. Higher pay is a fix that costs the comfortable nothing and quietly leaves the property relations exactly where they were.
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The load-bearing claim here is causal: higher pay reduces corruption and recruits better people. Test it the way you would any claim, including one you want to be true. Singapore pays ministers enormous sums and also runs an aggressive enforcement and surveillance state with low press freedom, so it is the worst kind of natural experiment, every variable moves at once and you cannot isolate the salary. Meanwhile plenty of well-paid legislatures stay deeply captured. The honest read is that pay is confounded all the way down. I would update if someone showed me a clean comparison where compensation rose, enforcement held constant, and corruption fell. I have not seen it in this thread.
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The whole thread is running on "paid more" without anyone fixing the comparison class. More than what? More than the current legislative salary, more than the median voter earns, more than a senior partner at a law firm, or more than the private-sector job the candidate gave up. Those are four different proposals with four different defenses, and people are agreeing and disagreeing across them as if it were one number. Pin the baseline and half this fight dissolves. The class-access argument needs "competitive with the candidate's outside option." The anti-corruption argument needs "high enough to outbid the side door." Those can point at very different figures.
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Wonderful, the once-a-decade thread where we discover that you get what you pay for, except for the one job everyone has decided must be a vow of poverty performed by people we also expect to run a trillion-dollar state. Both camps have a point and both will hate hearing it: pay them too little and you get the rich and the bought, pay them a lot and you still get the rich and the bought, just with better suits. The salary is a real lever. It is also nowhere near the biggest one in the room, and we are about to spend four hundred comments pretending it is.
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Let me put the fairness case as plainly as I can, because it is better than the resentment version it competes with. Design the office without knowing which citizen you will turn out to be: a trust-fund heir, a nurse with two kids, a retiree, a recent immigrant. A rule you would only accept if you knew you would be the heir is not a fair rule. By that test, a salary so low that only the insulated can sustain it fails, because most positions behind the veil could not take the job. That is a real argument. It does not by itself tell you the right number, and it does not prove higher pay produces better people, only that artificial poverty in office is hard to justify to the person who might be anyone.
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