Why term limits are a bad idea

A common "solution" offered to limit the civil destruction brought by governments is "term limits", or limiting the amount of time that politicians should be allowed to hold office. The idea is that "career politicians" can spend 30 years or more doing bad stuff, but if their time were limited to something less than that, they would have less time to do bad things.

The good is that people realize that politicians are bad and that they do bad things. But the reality of the situation is isn't intuitive. Have you ever seen a "cash grab booth", where a contestant is put into a small, clear, glass booth and money is quickly circulated through the booth on a strong air current and the contestant only has a small amount of time to grab as much cash out of the air as he can? That's term limits.

If a politician knows he only has a small amount of time in office, his incentive is to grab as much as he can before that term ends. When he leaves office, the office won't be vacant, it will be occupied by another politician, and that person will have the same incentive to smash and grab as the guy before him.

Conversely, if he knows that he's going to have a long tenure (and politicians are aware of the 90+% chance that they will be re-elected) the incentive to grab quickly is lower and the incentive to cultivate a longer-term view is greater.

So if you take the 30-year span of a single politician's time in office and compare it to the 30-year span of multiple politician's terms in office, one should be clearly worse than the other; 30 years of smash-and-grab-as-fast-as-you-can compared to 30 years of normal corruption.

Obviously, anyone who really cares knows that governments shouldn't exist, but as long as they're here we might as well not advocate for them to be a worse drain on civilization than they otherwise would be by advocating harmful ideas like term limits.