Citizens need government decisions made on the merits rather than on what enriches the decider. 0.50

Value: Fairness · Used on: Public office should not be usable for private gain.

Measured by	Share of official decisions made by an official holding a personal financial stake in the outcome
Belief Y	Public office should not be usable for private gain.	Truth 0.50

Validity ArgumentsInterest scoring →

Reasons to agree that this need is real and legitimate

#	Reason (pattern)	Truth	Link	Imp	Uniq	Score
1	Basic needA government whose decisions track what enriches the decider is not a government its citizens own, whatever else it does well.	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	+0.00
2	Recognized in lawThe criminal conflict-of-interest statute already imposes exactly this on every executive branch employee below the president.	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	+0.00
3	Widely held86 percent of registered voters backed a congressional stock trading ban, including 87 percent of Republicans and 88 percent of Democrats (Program for Public Consultation, 2023).	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	+0.00

Reasons to disagree

#	Reason (pattern)	Truth	Conf	Link	Imp	Uniq	Score
1	Claim on others' property or choicesEnforced strictly it would bar any official who owns anything from voting on anything that touches it, which is a claim on what officials may own.	0.50	0.00	1.00	0.50	1.00	-0.00
2	Pretext for another aimThe demand is usually raised against the other party's officials, which suggests the operative interest is partisan advantage.	0.50	0.00	1.00	0.50	1.00	-0.00

Total agree 0.00 · total disagree 0.00 · interest score 0.50

An interest is a need, stated so it can be argued: "[who] need [what]". Reasons here are about whether the need is real and legitimate, never about whether the belief is true and never about how many people hold it.

Check table

1	If the belief is true, the measure should show	Falls after the rule takes effect
2	If the belief is false, the measure should show	Unchanged
3	Latest reading (with source)	Not measured systematically; 78 members of one Congress filed late transaction reports (Insider, 2023)
4	Basic test: do the two sides expect different readings?	Yes: the readings differ, so this interest is at stake in the belief.
5	Computed validity	0.50 from 3 reason(s) to agree and 2 to disagree
6	Bottom line, typed by the author after the tables above	Near the top of any hierarchy of public needs, and contested only at the edges of its application.

The five steps, answered from the pages above. Only the one-sentence bridge and the bottom line are typed.

DefinitionsThe full explanation →

Validity: this page's truth score. It says how legitimate the need is in general, on its own. How much it drives a position is a different number (the Driver page), and how negotiable it is belongs on the feasibility track. Power never weights validity.
Measured by (row 4) is what a reading of this interest looks like; the readings in the check table say what each side expects to see if the belief is true or false. Content, not scores.

Where This Page Is Used

Top 5 of 25 rows shown. Show all

Page	Table	As	Its truth
Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain.	costs and benefits	who gains or pays	0.50
Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain.	interests	a row	0.50
Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain.	costs and benefits	who gains or pays	0.50
Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain.	interests	a row	0.50
Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain.	costs and benefits	who gains or pays	0.50
Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain.	interests	a row	0.50
Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain.	costs and benefits	who gains or pays	0.50
Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain.	interests	a row	0.50
Public office should not be usable for private gain.	interests	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “Members regularly trade in the industries their own committees oversee, which puts a private financial stake on both sides of decisions they control” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “A holdings ban removes the conflict itself instead of asking the public to police thousands of individual trades after the fact” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “Trading on a closed briefing is almost impossible to prosecute, so the only rule that can actually be enforced is one that does not require proving what an official knew” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to disagree: “A ban on the official leaves the conflict in place through spouses, dependent children, private partnerships, real estate and crypto, none of which most proposals reach” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to disagree: “Congress will not enforce a ban on itself, so the statute would put a symbol in place of the enforcement reform that could work” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This supporting finding: “Trades placed before legislative events earned abnormal returns of about 3 to 5 percent over 2014 to 2021” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This prediction if the belief is true: “Five years after a ban takes effect, individual equity holdings reported by members fall to near zero and no trading scandal originates in Congress” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This prediction if the belief is true: “A jurisdiction that adopts a holdings ban shows conflicted votes falling relative to comparable bodies that did not” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This prediction if the belief is false: “Reported conflicts migrate to spouse accounts and private partnerships, leaving the total number of conflict complaints unchanged” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring members of Congress and the president from owning or trading individual stocks would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “The anti-nepotism statute stops at the White House door, so the rule does not reach the place where the stakes are highest” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “A relative cannot be supervised, disciplined or fired the way another official can, so the ordinary checks on an official's conduct do not operate” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “An official role gives a family member a channel that foreign governments and business partners can use, with the family's private interests attached to it” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Barring the president and members of Congress from giving any official government function to a family member would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “The internal check failed in the one case that tested it: the mandatory presidential audit was dormant, and the audit of the first two years opened the day Congress asked for the returns” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “A published return can be checked by anyone, which is the only enforcement that does not depend on an agency the official appoints” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Requiring the president and members of Congress to publish their tax returns would reduce the use of public office for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “Clemency is the only executive power with no check at all: impeachment reaches the officer, not the act, and the act is final the moment it is signed” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “Pardons granted to the president's relatives, donors, business partners and co-defendants are the clearest case of office used for private benefit, and nothing reviews them” addresses the most important interest at stake in the belief: “Letting Congress overturn a presidential pardon by a two-thirds vote of both chambers would reduce the use of the pardon power for private gain”	interests listed	a row	0.50

Every page that reads this one. One claim, one home, every use visible.

Scoring EngineTruth scores →

Quantity	Value	How
Reasons to agree, total	0.00	sum of the agree side
Reasons to disagree, total	0.00	sum of the disagree side
Interest score	0.50	(agree + weight x starting point) / (agree + disagree + weight), starting point 0.50, weight 1.00
ReasonRank	0.0008	how much of the site depends on this page: rank 164 of 2173. The share of a walk that starts at the 162 beliefs and steps to the pages they read, with a 0.85 chance of stepping on each time
Work value	0.0006	ReasonRank x (1 - confidence): how much settling this page would be worth to everything above it
Completeness	yes	at least one scored reason on each side (an importance page: at least one interest; an interest page: both readings filled)

Cite this page Citizens need government decisions made on the merits rather than on what enriches the decider. Idea Stock Exchange, interest page citizens-need-government-decisions, truth 0.50, confidence 30%, revision 42c8344 of 2026-10-04. The revision is what makes this quotable: these numbers move as the argument is worked on, and rebuilding that revision reproduces them exactly.

Every number on this page as data: citizens-need-government-decisions.json. Constants: K = 1 · UNARG = 0.5 · DEFLINK = 1 · DEFIMP = 0.5 · DEFUNIQ = 1. A reason placed under a conclusion is presumed relevant until a linkage page says otherwise; the burden is on the challenger. The neutral start for importance, the wiki's own rule.

Every value here is computed from the tables above at build time. Nothing is typed.