All US appointed and elected officials enjoy a massive wealth accumulation premium.
In India, once you’re in the IAS your wealth potential is only limited by your incorruptibility.
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Auditing public official wealth is basic to democracies. Including from before attaining office. Because capture starts far upstream of office. Whether it is law school admissions (courts) or cronyist wealth sectors that rely heavily on regulatory capture (real estate/Trump)
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In general I tend to the view that even the “cleanest” wealth accumulation mechanisms like entrepreneurship are rooted in at least partly immoral captured historical advantages. The difference is, unlike in politics, nobody pretends they embody high-minded principles.
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You will notice that those who derp on the most about the virtues of capitalism and free markets are the ones who operate in the least free, most cronyist, politically captured market sectors. Not an accident. Guilty overcompensation of sorts.
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This is also why I think in general, while I am all for getting rich easy and quick, I can't chase money with any degree of real enthusiasm. While most of the $ I've made in my life has been on the cleaner end of the spectrum, I've used my share of morally shaky stepping stones.
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For the same reason, I have an anti-Lindy bias: my priors are: the longer a thing has endured, the more likely it is to be not just corrupt, but irredeemably corrupt in entrenched ways it is hard to do anything about. The corruption of the new is both shallower and more obvious.
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Perhaps the critics are right and NFTs are a scam. But I'd rather participate in that than in perpetuating FoundingFatherism by participating in politics. You can at least be on your guard and try to keep yourself honest.
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I suspect those with a firmly progressive (not just liberal) bias like me share this basic suspicion of the self-serving logics of history and claims about the cleanliness of wealth-creation mechanisms.
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The basic ideological priority of progressivism is to unwind the overhang of history over society. Break or weaken links to past to make room for the future. Operate on the assumption that the past is guilty until proven innocent, while trads operate on the opposite assumption.
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Replying to
One has a lot of its world already built, the other needs to clear room to get started
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