I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing. I’m not gonna do it.To me this is the sound of a guy who's cornered and sees that the windfall he's been betting on is slipping away. It's William H. Macy kicking at his car in the endless expanse of white snow in Fargo.
At about $171,000, the salary of the governor of Illinois is easily within the realm of what the vast majority of his constituents would (very reasonably) consider comfortable. But still, a useful data point to underline is that it's just about in the range of what the average Illinois district school superintendent gets, and only about half the salary of the highest paid local school chief. I don't think anybody in the country wants to make public service a sure path to riches--and there will never be a salary so high that it eliminates the temptations of getting more. But ever tightening ethics rules create a de facto property requirement for office holders. Self financed--in other words, really rich candidates--have in recent years very effectively plugged into an unspoken but pervasive acceptance of the idea that someone who comes into office without a fortune of his own will be corrupted. New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, who made his money at Goldman Sachs, was a pioneer in this and made the theme pretty much explicit with his slogan of "unbossed and unbought."
This is an age old problem, and I won't pretend to offer any solutions. It's worth noting, though, that some regimes have seen the problem of office holders profiting from their government work as so fiendishly intractable that they have simply chosen to institutionalize corruption--for instance, pre-Revolutionary France, where public office was a profit making venture and official positions could be bought and sold.
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