Now that the National Football League has apparently learned
that it can be costly to hire cheap officials, perhaps the rest of
us should learn the same lesson when it comes to government
officials, whose bad calls can do a lot more damage.
What do we do when we want a better car, a better home or a
better bottle of wine? We pay more for it. We definitely need a lot
better crop of public officials. Yet we insist on paying flea
market prices for people who will be spending trillions of tax
dollars, not to mention making foreign policy that can either
safeguard or jeopardize the lives of millions of Americans.
Any successful engineer, surgeon, or financier would have to
take a big pay cut to serve in Congress. A top student from a top
law school can get a starting salary that is more than we pay a
Supreme Court justice.
No doubt many, if not most, government officials are already
paid more than they are worth. But the whole point of higher pay is
to get better people to replace them.
We may say that we want people in Congress, the courts or the
White House who have some serious knowledge and experience in the
real world, not just glib tricksters who know how to pander for
votes. But we don’t put our money where our mouth is.
Let’s face it. You’re not likely to get a good suit of clothes
at a flea market. And you’re not likely to get the cream of the
crop to go into the government when they would have to accept a big
drop in income to do so.
There are always going to be warm bodies available to fill the
jobs in government. We have lots of warm bodies there now. There
will also always be some people who are willing to sacrifice their
family’s economic security and standard of living, in order to get
their hands on the levers of power.
These are precisely the kinds of people whom it is dangerous to
have holding the levers of power.
Can we afford to pay members of Congress, the President of the
United States, and federal judges the kinds of money that would
enable us to tap a far wider pool of far more knowledgeable people
with successful real world experience? We can’t afford not to.
Cheap politicians are expensive in their reckless spending of tax
money. It is the ultimate in being penny-wise and
pound-foolish.
To get some idea of the cost, ask yourself: How much would it
cost to pay every member of Congress, the president, and every
federal judge a million dollars a year?
There are 535 members of Congress, so a salary of a million
dollars a year would cost $535 million, or just over half a billion
dollars. There are 188 federal appellate judges and one President
of the United States. That’s 189 more people, bringing the total
number of people to 724, and the total cost to $724 million, at a
time when people in Washington are talking trillions.
That is less than one percent of the annual cost of the
Department of Agriculture. Put differently, we could pay all of
these 724 officials a million dollars a year each — for an entire
century — for less than it costs to run the Department of
Agriculture for one year.
If we limited how long any given individual could hold office in
the government — preferably one term — we could have highly
knowledgeable people with real world experience in charge of taking
care of the nation’s business, instead of spending their time doing
things to get reelected.
They would be a lot harder for special interests to bribe with
campaign contributions, when high officials would face no more
campaigns after getting elected. We don’t need career
politicians.
The best crop of public officials this country has ever had were
in the generation that founded the United States of America. Most
of the Founders had careers outside of politics.
Is all this a realistic prospect in the world today? Of course
not! What is the most realistic prospect today is the status quo
today.
But the New Deal was not a realistic prospect three years before
Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. It was not a realistic prospect
in 1775 that the American colonies would become an independent
nation a year later. The whole point of discussing new ideas is to
get people thinking about them, so that they might become realistic
prospects in the future.
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