[SoftTalker]

It may be idealistic, but I think that those elected to office or appointed to influential positions such as judges should do so largely out of a sense of public service instead of personal enrichment. For people who are motivated by greed or power, no amount of compensation will be enough, they will always be tempted to to increase their power and wealth by taking bribes or political favors.

Pay them a respectable salary but you do not and should not try to match what the private sector pays. It not the same playing field and should not attempt to be.

[lumb63]

I don’t understand this position. It feels to me like you’re proposing we financially exploit those who are magnanimous and duty-driven enough to tolerate public service. Do you have the same opinion regarding other organizations operating for public good, rather than financial self interest?

For instance, what you’re saying feels logically equivalent to me to saying we should tax charities more heavily since they aren’t driven by greed, or that we should underpay active duty military personnel since they’re driven more by love for their country than by self interest. It seems to me that it should be the exact opposite, and we should incentivize people to make sacrifices for the greater good.

Underpaying people who choose to enter a certain sector because of a personally held belief that they ought to be financially unmotivated, then ceding massive power to those people and allowing them to take bribes, seems to miss the forest for the trees.

EDIT: I’m also curious how you rectify your position with the empirical evidence that our current system, wherein public service is financially discouraged, has led to direct and indirect bribery and corruption in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. It seems to me that the current system isn’t working, and leaning further into the aspect that makes it not work is not a good idea. Maybe a more fruitful route would be reducing the power of individual representatives so that there is less incentive to bribe them, or outright banning the quid-pro-quo agreements that run rampant in our country currently, like prohibiting regulators from working for companies in the industry they regulated after their time in office.

[csnover]

I guess the OP thinks anyone sufficiently motivated by financial self-interest such that they won’t want the job unless it pays ‘enough’ is also someone who is going to be more open to bribery because they value personal wealth too much. I can see both sides on this but I don’t think it’s unreasonable.

People who are drawn to positions of power and also highly motivated by personal wealth seem like particularly bad choices if you want to avoid corruption, so keeping the salary low may sufficiently disincentivise this sort of person from entering the public sector.

On the other hand, public sector work is harder in many ways, so not providing equal or superior compensation may discourage many people who are entirely scrupulous but not foolish enough to both take on the extra burden of public sector work and make less money at the same time.

> It feels to me like you’re proposing we financially exploit those who are magnanimous and duty-driven enough to tolerate public service.

I understand that it may seem foolish or unjust, but it feels unreasonable to me to suggest it’s exploitative to pay someone a 97th-percentile salary[0] just because it’s not commensurate with private sector peers in a highly compensated industry.

> For instance, what you’re saying feels logically equivalent to me to saying we should tax charities more heavily since they aren’t driven by greed, or that we should underpay active duty military personnel since they’re driven more by love for their country than by self interest.

The problem as it applies to judges and legislators is that they represent a very small group of people with the ability to make high-stakes decisions that impact a large number of people, and their decisions are enforced by the power of the state.

Charities don’t have the power of the state behind their decisions, and personnel within the military apparatus tend not to have much individual power, so the incentives for corruption are much more limited (and if it does happen, much less impactful).

> It seems to me that the current system isn’t working, and leaning further into the aspect that makes it not work is not a good idea.

Is there some proof that under-compensation is the main source of the corruption in the current system? I have no evidence either way, but my sense is that it is not.

[0] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ at $250k

[dralley]

>financially exploit

$274,000 doesn't feel like financial exploitation to me, even if it's below market rate.

[Applejinx]

This. You cannot simply normalize graft on the grounds that somebody might exist who can out-bribe a government. Any more than you normalize murder because everybody eventually dies some way or other.

Having it act like the same playing field got us in this mess. I'll note there are some supreme court justices who apparently don't take bribes or suggest their power should be supplemented by enough bribery to equal that of the best private sector lawyers and/or the best mob bosses…