For instance, what you’re saying feels logically equivalent to me to saying we should tax charities more heavily since they aren’t driven by greed, or that we should underpay active duty military personnel since they’re driven more by love for their country than by self interest. It seems to me that it should be the exact opposite, and we should incentivize people to make sacrifices for the greater good.
Underpaying people who choose to enter a certain sector because of a personally held belief that they ought to be financially unmotivated, then ceding massive power to those people and allowing them to take bribes, seems to miss the forest for the trees.
EDIT: I’m also curious how you rectify your position with the empirical evidence that our current system, wherein public service is financially discouraged, has led to direct and indirect bribery and corruption in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. It seems to me that the current system isn’t working, and leaning further into the aspect that makes it not work is not a good idea. Maybe a more fruitful route would be reducing the power of individual representatives so that there is less incentive to bribe them, or outright banning the quid-pro-quo agreements that run rampant in our country currently, like prohibiting regulators from working for companies in the industry they regulated after their time in office.
