[ExI] hypocrisy?

[Anton Sherwood]

On 2020-12-24 16:22, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:
> Ben, you have an overlap in your post.  Politicians are low and so are 
> lawyers.  Of course the percentage of politicians in legislatures and 
> Congress that are lawyers must be pretty high.  That is a major reason 
> in my opinion that they just can't compromise.  Everyone is an enemy 
> trying to stifle one's efforts at passing legislation. 

Not all lawyers are litigators (civil or criminal); some specialize in 
drafting contracts.  Contract lawyering is (partly) negotiating; 
litigation is seeking to defeat the other side in the view of a neutral 
observer.  So one might expect legislatures to attract contract lawyers 
rather than litigators, as the task of legislation does not directly 
involve any third party.

The problem may be more that legislators make every difference a Big 
Deal because they need to look important.

> [...]  Someone suggested 
> awhile back that all elected politicians should be multimillionaires or 
> better, so that could take a bit of the personal accumulation of money 
> out of the process.  [...]

Sir Iain Moncreiffe remarked that the old practice of selling 
commissions in the British Army (and not paying officers enough to 
maintain the lifestyle expected of them) meant that officers could 
resign to protest unreasonable orders, without risking personal ruin.

-- 
*\\*  Anton Sherwood  *\\*  www.bendwavy.org