The US congress was supposed to be made up of ordinary citizens
And indeed they are, and this is the heart of the problem. They're just regular people like us, subject to the same prejudices, temptations, motivations, etc. We shouldn't be surprised when the motivations that are built into the system actually do something.
More concretely, we've vested incredible power with our politicians. That makes them huge targets for those with vested interests (whether those be corporation, special interests, foreign governments, what-have-you). The potential reward to them for getting influence is so great that they'll invest tremendously in trying to do so.
The idea that "public servants" don't magically become saints, but respond to the same incentives as do the rest of us, is the core of public choice economics [1]. There is, in fact, a fair amount of research and literature on the topic from an academic perspective.
From where I sit, if you recognize the problem as one where we're giving the corporations and special interests, etc., a huge potential payoff by finding ways to co-opt governmental power, then increasing that power to try to combat it doesn't make sense: it's just increasing the size of their potential payoff. It sounds like silly pop-Zen, but the way to get such corruption out of government is to limit the power of government.
the way to get such corruption out of government is to limit the power of government
Where's the power going to go? If you have a weak legislature that's clean-handed because it does little of consequence, that doesn't mean society is magically going to operate better. I'm also a fan of public-choice theory, but I think there are two aspects of the situation it fails to address:
1. Public administration is relatively transparent. Not as much as we'd like, of course regular people simply don't have the time, energy, or expertise to fully exploit this transparency (and so rely on lobbying organizations that do represent their interests, eg the ACLU or EFF), but the public sector is more transparent than the private sector. I don't have much faith in market mechanisms to correct excessive behavior in the private sector because bad actors can buy a lot of good PR.
2. A non-negligible degree of the power invested in government is the results of demands from the public, eg things like the clean water and the EPA exist because private entities exploited the commons sufficiently that there was eventually an outcry eg repeated fires on the Cuyahoga river. There are many similar demands for governmental action on climate change today, it's not hard to imagine a tipping point in the near future with carbon becoming much more heavily regulated than today. The fact that granting more power to government may well result in future abuses doesn't negate the existence of problems absent regulation.
In cases where it may not be appropriate to just drop all legislation, it may instead work well to devolve the power to more local levels. This would go a long way toward making the potential prize of influencing legislators and regulators damaging to us at a much more local scope. It would also allow the many local stages to be where we play out experiments to find what approaches work best - something that seems to be pretty much anathema in today's political scene.
Your example of the Cuyahoga River is pretty apt, actually. Consider:
"By the time Congress got around to passing the CWA in 1972, river fires were no longer a threat. Whatever else the CWA did — and it certainly helped improve many of the nation’s waters — it did little if anything to prevent rivers from catching flame. It’s also not clear how much the CWA accelerated improvements in water quality that were already underway at the time. While most states largely ignored water quality concerns in the first half of the twentieth century, state governments became far more active throughout the 1960s, such that by 1966 every state had enacted water pollution control legislation of its own. Progress was slow, but for those pollutants of greatest concern at the time, progress was being made well before the 1972 CWA was enacted, let alone before it was implemented and enforced." -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014...
I'm not so hot on local solutions. With 3000 counties in the US that leads to an awful lot of reinvented wheels and administrative waste, and local corruption is arguably harder to deal with because it's hard to get a big enough constituency together to force the issue in many jurisdictions.
River fires may have been an impetus for the clean water act, but observing that they were no longer a primary issue, while true, is beside the point. An emblematic issue (or instance of a general issue)is not necessarily representative of any statistical truth.
For example, I don't think most fracking activities trigger earthquakes, but it's not surprising that anti-fracking activists make a point of citing the incidents where it apparently has as a proxy for a larger number of environmental problems they worry about. Or consider how the protests over police brutality in Ferguson last year were not so much because Michael Brown best exemplified innocent victimhood, but because leaving his dead body lying in the street for hours on end was perceived as exemplary of callous indifference to local people's sensibilities (at best) or calculated intimidation of that community (at worst). One could think the shooting itself to have been justified but still be outraged about the aftermath of the event. Much of the sound and fury of the debate focused on the shooting incident but if you go back and look at contemporary news reports the initial reaction was to the way the body was left lying there in the open.
(And "millionaire" (net worth >$1M) isn't really a terribly high bar for mid- to late-career professionals.) That's not to say they're representative of their average constituents' income levels but I wouldn't reasonably expect them to be.
I shouldn't waste my energy but 189 out of 538 have a Net Worth of more than $1M. 189/538 < .5. They have assets and they have liabilities. That's what net worth means. Some have absurd levels of debt. I assume some of that debt is related to campaigns but I don't actually know. However you made a statement that is factually untrue.
I read the wiki page on public choice theory and eventually found a wiki page for The Myth of the Rational Voter [1] where they talk about rational irrationality [2].
The idea is that people are more likely to make irrational decisions when the cost of that decision is low, like in voting. An irrational vote only harms you as an individual in a very small way since the cost is distributed across the entire population.
So, it seems to me that we should look for ways to increase the cost of irrational decisions. I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this, but one way would be to reduce the power that government has, thereby reducing the impact of irrational decisions.
Wouldn't that make the decisions people make even less valuable? Wouldn't that promote irrationality on a larger scale, if they're coupled as you say? Are you arguing that there is an inflection point or are you arguing for a useless government?
"Come up with"? Absolute monarchies actually worked pretty well overall, we don't need to "come up with" anything when we can just restore the Stuarts[0] and their system, for instance. Okay, the current elites (who have the most chance of making such a change nonviolently for a large number of people) might want to make some alterations for modern technology and to transition away from the incredibly egotistical viewpoint of the People thinking they know anything about governance, and they might want to make sure the guy they put in charge has a philosophy and will at least approaching that of the late Lee Kuan Yew.
But really we just need anything that gets power, perceived or real, away from the People.[1][2]
And indeed they are, and this is the heart of the problem. They're just regular people like us, subject to the same prejudices, temptations, motivations, etc. We shouldn't be surprised when the motivations that are built into the system actually do something.
More concretely, we've vested incredible power with our politicians. That makes them huge targets for those with vested interests (whether those be corporation, special interests, foreign governments, what-have-you). The potential reward to them for getting influence is so great that they'll invest tremendously in trying to do so.
The idea that "public servants" don't magically become saints, but respond to the same incentives as do the rest of us, is the core of public choice economics [1]. There is, in fact, a fair amount of research and literature on the topic from an academic perspective.
From where I sit, if you recognize the problem as one where we're giving the corporations and special interests, etc., a huge potential payoff by finding ways to co-opt governmental power, then increasing that power to try to combat it doesn't make sense: it's just increasing the size of their potential payoff. It sounds like silly pop-Zen, but the way to get such corruption out of government is to limit the power of government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice