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A long time when I was a sophomore in college, I remember a certain line of thinking I went through:
It is important for politicians to be incentivized properly. Currently they are too susceptible to bribery (hard, soft, in between) and other things.
It is difficult to actually prevent bribes. For example, they may come in the form of "Pass the laws I want passed and instead of handing you a lump sum of money, I'll give you a job that pays $5M/year for the next 30 years after your term is up."
Since preventing bribes is difficult, you could instead just say that if you're going to be a politician -- a public servant -- you have to live a low income lifestyle from here on out. You and your family. Say, 25th percentile income level. Or Minimally Viable Standard of Living if you want to get more aggressive. The money will be provided to you by the government and you're not allowed to earn your own money elsewhere. If you start driving lamborghinis, we'll know.
The downside I see is that it might push away talent. But would it? Normally if you pay a lower salary you get less talented employees but for roles like President of the United States of America, or even Senator of Idaho, I think the opportunity for impact would be large enough to get very talented people, and any losses in talent would be made up for reduced susceptibility to bribery.
I often cringe at the ideas of my past selves but this one still seems interesting.
I haven't seen any good reasoning or evidence that allowing businesses and titans to bribe politicians via lobbyists actually results in worse laws. People gasp when I say this, but the default doesn't seem that much better. If Peter Thiel had been able to encourage Trump to pick the cabinet heads he wanted then our COVID response would have gone much better.
2Biff Wiff
To me the reasoning seems pretty straightforward:
1. If the politician is trying to appease special interests, that will usually comes at the expense of society. I guess that is arguable though.
2. If (1), that would be "worse" because goodness depends on how the policies affect society as a whole.
Most billionaires at least seem to donate ideologically, not really based on how politicians affect their special interest group. There's definitely a correlation there, but if billionaires are just more reasonable on average then it's possible that their influence is net-positive overall.