Bluesky

There's so much to address here, it's crazy. I'll give it a shot, I guess.

Incentive in this context is not really that relevant. Sure, Incentivization of systems and all that, but in terms of actual outcomes and how people make decisions, incentives are a terrible predictor of behavior and motive. Additionally, to try and say the one factor is all that matters is ridiculous.

To dismiss morality and my original subject of how dumb some legislators are, conflate incentive and motive as one thing and the only legitimate explanation of evil legislative decisions, then conclude that people are inherently(or even just predisposed to) evil because power is uhh... yeah, that's pretty wild.

You also state that I believe people can/do resist abusing their power. This is a non-starter as nothing I said even suggests such a thing, you made that up. On top of that, I can explicitly state that is, in fact, not my position on the topic of abuse of power. I already reject the framing of power and abuse of it as presented in your comment before any argument is even made. There's so much more to it than just "power corrupts". And power isn't even a factor for many people anyway, even in the context of being in a position of power. People as a whole really aren't that simple.

The only thing I was getting at is that there are people in decision-making positions that appear to make a decision because they're evil or corrupt or whatever else, but in reality, they're just really dumb. This doesn't exclude other factors, nor does this make a definitive statement about reality, it's just an observation from my experience in politics challenging a common incredulity that "they can't really be that stupid" to which I'm backing up the common saying "never attribute to malice what can sufficiently be explained by stupidity".