Some officeholders want to keep using their position and their families to make money. 0.50

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

Measured by	Income officials and their relatives earn from activities that depend on the office
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	Conf	Link	Imp	Uniq	Score
1	Widely heldWanting to profit from one's position is common enough that every ethics statute since 1962 is written on the assumption that someone will.	0.50	0.00	1.00	0.50	1.00	+0.00

Reasons to disagree

#	Reason (pattern)	Truth	Link	Imp	Uniq	Score
1	Claim on others' property or choicesIt can only be satisfied by using decisions that belong to the public as private property.	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	-0.00
2	Forbidden by lawThe paid form of it is bribery, and the rest is what the conflict-of-interest statutes exist to prevent.	0.50	1.00	0.50	1.00	-0.00
3	Pretext for another aimIt is never stated in its own name: it travels as property rights, privacy or presidential discretion.	0.50	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
2	If the belief is false, the measure should show	Continues
3	Latest reading (with source)	Not measured directly; campaign committees paid $1.3 million in wages to candidates' relatives in one cycle (OpenSecrets, 2020)
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 1 reason(s) to agree and 3 to disagree
6	Bottom line, typed by the author after the tables above	Held by some and valid by almost no standard. It is on the page so that the scoring of a bad interest is visible rather than assumed.

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 8 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
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 disagree: “The problem people actually point to is relatives trading on the family name in private business, which this proposal does not touch” 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

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	0.0006	how much of the site depends on this page: rank 170 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	0.0004	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 Some officeholders want to keep using their position and their families to make money. Idea Stock Exchange, interest page some-officeholders-want-keep, truth 0.50, confidence 29%, 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: some-officeholders-want-keep.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.