There are political enviroments in which the actors try to do what is right instead of just maximizing their personal interests.

The only one I've heard of is "fiction." Did you have an example in mind?

An example is in Federalist No. 10. Madison is trying to design a political environment resilient to the corrupt effects of factions:

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? and what are the different classes of Legislators, but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction, must be expected to prevail. Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? are questions which would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes; and probably by neither, with a sole regard to justice and the public good. The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party, to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling, with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.

It is in vain to say, that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm: Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all, without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another, or the good of the whole.

His concrete solutions are to choose representative democracy over direct democracy, and to have large republic rather than a small republic.

A more recent example would be last year's ban on members of Congress trading stocks based on the inside information they have as lawmakers. I think Milton Friedman's point is that one should direct efforts toward supporting policies like that, rather than trying to elect politicians who are too ethical to insider-trade.

A large part of the Federalist Papers is about designing structures and incentives to make government robust against overwhelming ambition and corruption - to make ambition in one branch check ambition in another branch, similarly between state and federal and between state and state.

That said, I think Friedman (I was never on a first name basis with him) is overly dismissive of electing the right people. But again we need to set up structures and incentives differently, so elections are less of an entertaining spectacle and more like a hiring search or job interview. The structures or institutions that might improve the situation don't have to come from legislation (though some of them could - I'm not against that on principal); e.g. parties weren't legislated into being, and if we want something better, we should not look exclusively to legislation.

It seems at least conceivable to have some agreement across party lines that our electoral processes, as I said before, look less like a circus to which we passively attend, and more like a hiring search / job interview type process.

I've often thought of ironically proposing that we should legislate that job interviews have to be more like elections: i.e. stop limiting candidates' ability to express themselves. If somebody wants to bring a brass band to an interview, it's their free speech right to do so. If they want to spread nasty rumours about the other candidates why not?

Not so ironically, maybe our best hope is to persuade people that our current approach with its sound bites, catch phrases, push polls, gerrymandered "safe seats" and so on is a source of dangerous blindness that affects all of us, with all of our different interpretations of "the good" (of the country, etc.); to persuade people to find all of that current process repulsive, and to insist that all that airtime, column inches, etc., be devoted to information about the candidates, analysis of the current crises and challenges and possibilities, and to debates of all sorts: dozens of debates, discussions, and joint press conferences among the candidates.

One problem: "Information" (as in "information" about the candidate, etc.) is a word that gets bandied about too casually. What might possibly be done to increase the sanity with which people evaluate what is and isn't truly "information". I think that is the big problem that people concerned with rationality might be able to make some progress in solving.

Concretely, Milton Friedman probably didn't have a workable plan for bringing about such an environment, though he may have thought he did; I'm not familiar enough with his thinking. One next-best option would be to try to convince other people that that's what part of a solution to bad government would look like, which under a charitable interpretation of his motives, is what he was doing with that statement he made.

The policies that Milton advocated got a huge boost because companies put lobbyists who distribute campaign money in the "right places" to switch political incentives.

You seem to be confusing support for a free market with rent seeking. Milton Friedman supported free markets, in this and your follow up comment you seem to equate this with rent seeking.

Simplest positive example I can think of offhand: if there's lots of content-free posting going on and you want it to go away, changing the board parameters so that user titles are no longer based on postcount goes a surprisingly long way.

Simplest negative example I can think of: if you think there's too much complaining going on (I didn't, but the board owner at the time did), allocating a subforum for complaints will only make things worse. Even if you call it something like "Constructive Criticism".

Look up some of the karma discussions on this very site.

I do have experience with moderating a large forum and I still believe in not trying to corrupt people.

I'd say that setting up incentives so that people within a system do culturally useful things out of their own self-interest is about as close to an opposite of corrupting people as we're likely to find.

You want people that are open for rational discouse and who changes their position when you bring them arguments to change their opinions even in the absence of giving them incentives to switch their position.

Be sure to let us know when you find such people. One of the main conceits of this site is that rationalists should win. If it's possible to get ahead by not being a rationalist (even temporarily), people are going to do that. Ultimately, I think what the original quote from Friedman boils down to is the old adage that you should try to fix the system rather than blame the people in it.