Janet Yellen is about to cycle back into power in the Biden Administration. Yellen, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank who served the global banks (if not the American People) very well during her tenure, has made over seven million dollars in speaking fees from these same banks in the two years since she stepped down.
Call me a cynic, but I am going to say that she didn't get that seven million dollars because she is a spellbinding public orator. Rather, speaking fees have become a legal way to bribe politicians and top-level government regulators. It is a way to pay off people who have served a particular special interest well. Making them rich sends the signal to the next bunch of regulators that if they keep the money flowing then they too will be rewarded for their treachery. And rewarded in a way that is not only legal, but if they try hard enough they can even delude themselves into thinking that it is legitimate. That people really value their views on things enough to pay six figures for a forty minute speech.
If we ban such a practice, many people who are insightful and great communicators will refuse to enter public service. It will block out just the kind of people we need to go in! Additionally, the bad actors will find another way. Companies will hire their spouse ala Barbara Boxer, or their children ala Hunter Biden and work the bribes in that way. They may buy large number of copies of their books, or hire them for product endorsements. "Consulting fees" is a popular way to legally bribe politicians as well.
I don't want to be defeatist. Even though you can never stop corruption, there are things that you can do in order to prevent the wholesale purchase of your government which has occurred in the United States. But in order to do this you must give up one thing. You must give up centralization. You must give up the idea that inserting your preferred person at the top of the pyramid will alter the laws of human nature and self-interest. You must buy-in to doing government smarter, and the way that the Founding Fathers of the United States intended.
That is, a government where the powers of the central government are few and defined, and those of the states (and preferably the localities as in what they called "Town Rule") are numerous and indefinite. To continue to support the vast central government we have now is a choice to continue to support gross corruption. De-centralized government is the only kind of government where market forces can act the other way- to encourage clean government rather than empower corruption as our current system does.
You must remove high-stakes regulators, administrators, and politicians in order to make the costs of corruption so high that it is no longer rational to pay them. If there are hundreds of small agencies and offices scattered everywhere each under the watchful eye of local people instead of one huge one with a giant staff insulated in the national capitol then the costs and risks of buying them off becomes unworkable. In some cases, the entire function must be removed. For example, you cannot have central banking and decentralized government. You must choose one or the other. And since you cannot have true political freedom without decentralization, you cannot have central banking for any length of time and expect any other outcome than the one we have- giant corporations buying off banking regulators in order to loot the rest of us who suffer under a progressive loss of freedom and local choice as all decisions are increasingly made in the national capitol.
When I say we should support the changes necessary to return and sustain this method of governance I mean several things. This includes buying in to the changes necessary to keep the system of checks and balances they set up from being eroded over time. And a necessary part of that is a commitment to a diversity of political parties, including state-only parties with no national head-quarters. Just cheering for team red or team blue, as if giving either one of those crime-families a monopoly of power would make anything better, must be rejected as part of the problem, not part of the solution. It it no longer intellectually defensible as the act of a patriot.
There are thirteen doorways to centralization of power. If all thirteen are not kept shut, then each generation will grow up in a nation with a more centralized government than the last, no matter how people vote or otherwise choose to live. Those doorways, and how to shut them, are described in "Localism, a philosophy of government". The case for localism as a political ideal verses the two extremes of centralization or anarchy is made in "Localism Defended".
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