Officials need rules they can follow without a lawyer and without violating them by accident. 0.50

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

Measured by	Number of inadvertent reporting violations per year
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	Widely heldEvery official and every staffer subject to these rules holds this interest, across both parties.	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	+0.00
2	Recognized in lawFair notice of what a rule requires is a general principle of law, not a favor to officials.	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	+0.00
3	Asks no transfer from othersA clearer rule costs nobody anything; it is a drafting question.	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	+0.00

Reasons to disagree

#	Reason (pattern)	Truth	Conf	Link	Imp	Uniq	Score
1	Already metThe current rule is not complex: report a transaction within 45 days.	0.50	0.00	1.00	0.50	1.00	-0.00
2	Pretext for another aimComplexity is invoked to explain violations that were not accidents, which is why the late filings cluster among active traders.	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 toward zero
2	If the belief is false, the measure should show	Stays at current levels
3	Latest reading (with source)	78 members of the 117th Congress filed late under the STOCK Act (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	Valid and usually ignored, and it is the interest a bright-line ban serves best.

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 14 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.	interests	a row	0.50
This reason to agree: “Disclosure has failed as a check: 78 members of one Congress filed late under the STOCK Act, the standard penalty is a $200 fee that is routinely waived, and no member has faced a serious sanction” 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: “The Federal Reserve barred its own policymakers from holding individual stocks in 2022 and kept functioning and kept hiring, which shows a comparable institution can operate under the rule” 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: “78 members of the 117th Congress violated the STOCK Act's disclosure deadlines” 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: “Federal Reserve officials have been barred from holding individual stocks, sector funds, individual bonds, crypto and derivatives since May 2022, with preclearance and a one-year holding period” 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 rule already applies to every other federal agency, so extending it closes a gap rather than inventing a restriction” 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 disagree: “The route is constitutionally narrow: a disclosure condition on ballot access was already struck down once, and a badly drafted rule would be litigated rather than obeyed” 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 work: “Insider, Conflicted Congress (2021 to 2023)” 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

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	0.0003	how much of the site depends on this page: rank 927 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	0.0002	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 Officials need rules they can follow without a lawyer and without violating them by accident. Idea Stock Exchange, interest page officials-need-rules-can, 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: officials-need-rules-can.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.