Been sayin' this for years.
Sowell is right on the money, as usual.
Part of wanting to be an elected official is serving your country for patriotic reasons. I think we should be paying politicians less money and instituting term limits as well.
I would prefer to have someone in office that is serving for the love of their country, than serving to benefit themselves.
Treat Congress and other elected offices like we do the military ( in a sense ).
People should serve for/with pride, personal gain should never come into play.
You want politicians who care more for this country than themselves, then make them prove its not about themselves.
This
'Some may hope for lucrative jobs after leaving politics.'
is the elephant in the room when talking about term limits alone as a cure for political corruption.
I think Sowell may have a point about paying for top talent in Congress. The two problems I see are:
1) Politics may be too special a skillset to master and make use of during a single term. It would be like investing millions in training somebody and then firing them.
2) For some people, no amount of money is enough. Not even a $60M Senate term.
Used in conjunction with a complete elimination of lobbyist gifts, and removing some of the incentive for lobbying in the first place, we could end up with a much cleaner political environment.
A NRST replacement of all income and payroll taxes would remove the incentive that many groups (especially business) have for lobbying. Congress currently has far too much discretion in who and what gets taxed. Without that discretion, they would not be in a position to grant so many favors.
The key excerpts:
If we paid every member of Congress $10 million a year, that would not increase the federal budget by one percent.
Chances are that it would reduce the federal budget considerably, when members of the Senate or the House of Representatives no longer needed campaign contributions or the personal favors of special interest groups and their lobbyists.
...
Money is not the only thing that corrupts. Power also corrupts and some people go into politics for power.
Nothing can be done about such people -- except force them to compete with other people, drawn from a far larger pool, including top people in highly paid professions who today can seldom afford to serve in Congress at the expense of their family's standard of living and financial security.
...
The idea of paying the kind of money that would attract the kind of people we need in government runs against many prejudices. Just plain envy is one. Some people feel that those they elect should not make so much more than they do.
But think about it: If your child had some life-threatening condition that required some very demanding surgery, would you worry about whether the surgeon who saves your child's life had an annual income that was several times what you make?
Members of Congress have not only trillions of dollars of our tax money in their hands, they also have in their hands our lives and the lives of our children and our nation. Are you going to worry about their incomes or about what caliber of people we can attract to make the momentous decisions that have to be made?
...
Simple answer to the problem:
(1) Constitutional Amendment to say you can only serve one term which would be 6 years long. No reelections. This would be for all Reps, Senators, and the President. Elections would be rotated in 2 year cycles; reps on 2006, Senators in 2008, President in 2010 ... then repeat.
(2) ANY conviction of political corruption (money, influence, etc..) no matter how slight would be a Capital offense to be punished by public hanging on the Capital Steps.