> if you are a public servant. I don't understand why private citizens are held to higher standards of conduct than politicians and cops.
Last time I checked, politicians and cops are private citizens...
Wherever you stand on this, I can't understand the justification for this "one rule for thee" position.
Logistically, when you combine private citizenship with government you get corruption problems because incentives are so misaligned.
In fact private citizenship combined with government is the origin of corruption. Think about it, as a government official your incentive should be to preserve order, fairness and honor. As a private citizen your goal is to optimize the amount of money you make via business or employment through whatever means possible. That means exploiting loopholes and possibly when no one is looking, breaking the law.
The incentives are orthoganol and it does make sense to have a different set of rights and rules for government officials and private citizens. The minute you take the attitudes of private business/citizens into the world of government you get people creating rules that are corrupt.
> As a private citizen your goal is to optimize the amount of money you make
Ok.
I'm interested in why you think this is the goal of citizens (but not of government).
To be clear: I don't believe this should be the goal of government. I don't really understand why this should be the goal of citizens. I've emphasised the term "should" here, which is a somewhat odd moral term in general, but if we're applying a "should" to government to differentiate them from private citizens, there needs to be a symmetrical. Optimizing individual wealth is certainly an emergent goal of specific individuals, but I can't think of a reason to broadly apply a moral "should" to this goal. If we're optimising for positive outcomes at a system/global/community level (which is generally the intent of wanting a functional government), then encouraging citizens to hoard wealth has not tended to be (positively) contributory to such outcomes.
This is the definition of capitalism. The system is set up this way. Of course as a human you're not completely embodied by the system and you clearly have beliefs and philosophies different from the "system".
But you cannot deny that you as an individual are HEAVILY influenced by the system can culture you live in. Status is equated to those who have the most money. Regardless of yourself as an individual, in aggregate this is how people behave and a good basic universal model that predicts behavior. But additionally outside of culture, the logistical reality of the society we live in is that money is the basis of survival. All of our morals and philosophies are thrown out the window the minute when we are poor or if we have no money and we do need money to buy food to eat. So money and business is not only a status thing but it forms the basis of survival as well.
This is not about your beliefs or morality. This is about the practical reality. In addition to this, capitalism so far is the the only known effective system to create modern economies of scale. We tried to make things fair, ideal and utopian with communism, but, practically speaking, we haven't seen it work.
I'd argue the incentives of elected government and private citizens are even more misaligned than "private" ones.
Elected government official doesn't own or have perpetual interest. All he can do is plunder as fast as he can in his unowned fiefdom before it passes on to the next guy. Fully private government would have incentive at least to preserve the value of the "Kingdom" if nothing else for his own children and because he sees the Kingdom as his own and destroying it for short term gain would be irrational.
But then you have the tragedy of the commons. As a central dictator, yes you want to preserve your government, and you act in ways that do this because you are the direct owner.
But in a democracy where you are one government official among many many other officials, one small corruption change that benefits yourself individually hardly effects the overall government. It is rational for you to do small damage to the overall government and gain a reward that benefits you disproportionally. It is the MOST logical action.
But then every government official acting rationally in aggregate causes the overall government to become extremely corrupt and that is the tragedy of the commons. Rational action in aggregate becomes irrational. Government needs to be separate from private business.
I guess it's because it's so culturally ingrained that it's hard to separate. The chase for money and business is entirely cultural. Money is paper and it's all fantasy stuff and the reason why we value it is solely because of culture. Government ideally needs to be seperate from this culture and have a more militaristic based honor structure where the incentive is to guard the citizenry. Government needs it's own cultural values. Easier said than done, practically every government official IS a private citizen and they all face the same misaligned incentives.
> politicians and cops are private citizens
You may be confusing the civilian/military distinction with private citizens versus public officials. (A delineation American cops fuck with.)
They're actually public figures and have different standards since they're being paid by the public to represent their interests.
> You cant understand why the people with a monopoly on violence and force have higher scrutiny? -- @retr0rocket
Replying here to this seemingly flagged/dead comment (not sure why it was flagged - a very reasonable question).
I fully support higher scrutiny of public officials & cops, but this frankly isn't that. First & foremost, the problems you're describing are systemic, not individual. Monitoring a cop's phone isn't going to reduce police violence if the system isn't accountable - this is essentially the "bad apple" argument. The entire system needs drastic reform: backdoors won't solve any real problems here.
Secondly, independently of the levels of reform needed, at an individual level we're talking workplace conduct, reporting, protocols & transparency -vs- dystopian privacy invasion. There's a very broad spectrum here long before we reach the need for extremes.
Lastly, you need to look at the systems doing the monitoring of politicians' & cops' phones in this hypothetical scenario: if those systems contain the same systemic corruptions (which they inevitably do), the entire argument for oversight is moot.
You cant understand why the people with a monopoly on violence and force have higher scrutiny?