The Current System Fails to Attract the People We Want in Power

We have a persistent misunderstanding about political leadership that is actively worsening our problems: we imagine that competent, honest people will seek power out of moral duty, and that low pay is a virtue that keeps politics “clean.”

In reality, the opposite is true.

Positions of rulership carry extraordinary responsibility, risk, scrutiny, and opportunity cost.

Anyone competent enough to govern a complex modern society is, almost by definition, capable of earning vastly more money, with less exposure and less reputational risk, in the private sector. When we deliberately underpay such positions, we are not signaling virtue, we are signaling that we do not value competence.

It is true that a very small number of people will pursue power out of moral obligation alone. But this is a statistical anomaly, not a governing strategy.

Even in a country the size of the United States, the number of individuals willing to bear immense personal cost purely out of duty is vanishingly small, a handful per generation at best. That is not enough to staff a legislature, an executive, a judiciary, regulatory bodies, and oversight institutions. And even among those few, not all will succeed, remain healthy, or avoid bad luck. Civilizations cannot be run on moral miracles.

What happens under low-pay regimes is entirely predictable:

Competent, honest people self-select out.

Those who remain are either:

- ideologues who value power over outcomes, or

- opportunists who expect to be compensated indirectly through corruption, influence, or post-office rewards.

Low official pay does not reduce corruption. It filters for people who plan to corrupt.

Why Punishment and Transparency Alone Cannot Fix This

Many people respond by saying: “Fine, then we’ll just impose stricter transparency and harsher punishments.” This sounds serious, but it misunderstands how institutions form and sustain themselves.

Punishment without prior attraction creates a perverse outcome:

1) It further deters competent people, who already have better options.

2) It leaves enforcement in the hands of the incompetent, the ideological, or the corrupt.

It turns transparency into a weapon rather than a tool, selectively applied, politicized, or performative.

This leads to the exact failure mode we see today: rules that exist on paper but are enforced arbitrarily, by people who lack either the skill or the incentive to enforce them fairly.

A crucial question is almost never asked:

Who is supposed to design, implement, and enforce transparency and accountability if we have not first attracted competent people into the system?

You cannot build high-quality enforcement institutions with low-quality personnel. You cannot punish corruption out of a system that has selected for corruption.

Why the Order Matters

The sequence of the solution is not optional.

First, you must make rulership positions sufficiently rewarding to attract people who:

- have real alternatives,

- have reputations to protect,

- and have something substantial to lose.

Then, once competent people are present in sufficient numbers, you can:

- build real transparency,

- create auditability,

- and establish credible enforcement mechanisms.

Only then does punishment become effective, because it is:

- competently administered,

- evenly applied,

- and backed by institutions that function.

Reversing this order guarantees failure. Punishment-first approaches do not purify systems; they hollow them out.

The Core Correction

The uncomfortable truth is this:

If public office does not pay enough to attract capable people, the system will be run either by fools or by criminals, and often by criminals who pretend to be fools.

Compensation is not about rewarding virtue. It is about correcting selection pressure. Transparency and punishment are not substitutes for this, they are downstream tools that only work once the right people are present to wield them.

None of this is easy. If it were easy, history would look very different. But difficulty does not excuse getting the order wrong. And right now, we are getting the order wrong in a way that guarantees continued institutional decay.