Sure, but it doesn't really change motivations around that. Shady politicians might do that anyway, bet or no bet.
The problem with sabotaging yourself is that it challenges the assumption that everyone is playing to win. If anything, supporting other candidates might be questionable, if you bet on yourself losing.
That's a truism. But it ignores The Iron Law of Oligarchy, Pareto Principle, and dozens more that remind us that power tends towards centralization. It's currently fashionable to call out the billionaires, but if you removed them, they'd just be replaced by corrupt government officials, or something else.
That's not to say we should just throw up our hands and accept every social injustice. But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.
More importantly we shouldn't deny the rest of humanity benefits on the basis that the majority of the benefit accrues to the powerful. We should strive to change the distribution pattern, not remove the benefit.
The problem with billionaires is that they are able to hoard so much money by exploiting others. We would be much better off if billionaires weren't given so much advantage by Capitalism as those resources would be much more useful if distributed.
The biggest problem we currently have with billionaires is that they are now so rich that the world becomes like a game to them and some of them are deliberately pushing us to a dystopia where non-billionaires become functional slaves (c.f. Amazon workers).
Right, giving up is actually how these things end up becoming principles/laws. Power centralizes because people become complacent and ignorant on matters of power, so there ends up being a power vacuum, to which others seize the opportunity. But absolute power centralization almost never occurs, due to the delegation that is necessary to wield that power in practice, and so these two forces end up balancing each other. As such, the equilibrium point (or point of maximum entropy) ends up being some type of oligarchy. But anyone can take steps to address this and adjust this equilibrium point, but it takes active work.
that's violence by the state though. That's exactly the kind of violence GP said are legal (in my reading, no moral stance was taken about this state of matters)
We did this in the late 1800's and early 1900's because the upper classes understood that they needed to be afraid of the masses. Prior to that political violence seems like it was the order of the day. The US has always had a pretty strong aristocracy, but the aristocrats were variously either moral people or they at least had enough of a sense of self-preservation that they wouldn't get too greedy.
One of the most interesting aspects of the policing power in the premodern era was the existence and split of a powerful church.
Religious institutions had some access to legitimate violence in a way that the state couldn’t control. Once authoritarianism gave way to more democratic governance, that effectively disappeared.
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