Monday, April 4, 2011

Not the Conventional Reaction, But Still...

So, we all know that recently some Republican Congressman from Wisconsin claimed that his family of seven is struggling on the Congressional salary of $174,000. Various of his constituents and commentators from the world in general criticized/mocked him for that, because, you know, that's not a bad salary. And, you know what, I agree: he's an upper-middle-class American, more materially prosperous than 99.5% or so of the world's populace. So it's silly of him to refer to himself as "struggling." But it is still true that we ought to be increasing the salaries of our elected representatives, our judges, and public servants generally. Why? Because a) these people are doing good work, serving the public, and that's something we should reward from a moralistic perspective, and b) we do want to make careers in public service attractive. In particular, if you start out being not-particularly-rich and you go to DC to be a public servant, given that the cost of living in DC is rather exorbitantly high, it's not the easiest of livelihoods. Which makes it a lot easier for people who are particularly rich to begin with to want to be public servants. Which gets us lots of rich people running our country. If, on the other hand, we pay people enough that they really can make a high-quality living being a public servant, then people who are not rich will want to be public servants somewhat more readily. Similarly, since campaigning takes up a large percentage of your time while you're, you know, campaigning, any public financing of campaigns really ought to include stipends for the candidate's living expenses. Yes, it feels like they then get to live at taxpayer expense, but it also means that the un-rich get to run for office without the prospect of spending a few months with essentially no income. It's all very well and good to talk about how all of this will give people greedy, money-grubbing incentives to want to be public servants, but if the alternative is a world where only rich people, who are likely to follow a generally pro-obtaining-money philosophy in their whole life, are public servants, you get kind of the same thing in the end, except with less equal opportunity to be, say, a Congressman.

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