HOW should one value public service? It is not business,
certainly; but it is not ethereal, like literature, either.
At one extreme, there is Mahatma Gandhi, the Virginia Woolf of
politics. He owned little more than the dhotis he wore, his
spectacles, his spinning wheel and a clutch of holy books.
Few if any among us would take that model seriously, but it still
retains an enormous psychological attraction. Public service, we
like to say, involves service; and service, we insist, should
involve sacrifice. Service = sacrifice = relatively low pay: That
is an equation that would win approval in any number of straw
polls, even in Singapore.
In the United States, politicians take such polls seriously, and as
a result, the quality of government has declined.
If there is any doubt on that score, one need only consider the
2006 Annual Report on the Federal Judiciary that Mr John Roberts,
the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, released early this
week.
CJ Roberts devoted the entire report to low judicial salaries - an
issue that 'has been ignored far too long', he said 'and has now
reached the level of a constitutional crisis that threatens to
undermine the strength and independence of the federal
judiciary'.
In 1969, 'federal district judges made 21 per cent more than the
dean at a top law school and 43 per cent more than its senior law
professors', he pointed out.
Today, federal district judges are paid about half what senior law
academics are paid. As a result, less than 40 per cent of today's
federal bench comes from the private sector, compared to 65 per
cent in the 1950s.
'It changes the nature of the federal judiciary when judges are no
longer drawn primarily from among the best lawyers in the
practising bar,' the CJ moaned.
How could this have happened? The cause, in a nutshell, was
political cowardice.
In 2000, former president Bill Clinton, who did not dare raise his
own salary for fear of the political repercussions, agreed to raise
that of his successor to US$400,000, plus US$50,000 for expenses,
almost double what he got.
But he did not press Congress to raise salaries down the line; and
congressmen were not willing to raise their own salaries so
everyone else's could rise too.
This self-imposed poverty did not really matter to the politicians.
Mr Clinton now earns US$250,000 per speech on the lecture circuit,
and has become a multi-millionaire in his retirement, as he
cheerfully admits, merely doing what he would have done in any
event - talk.
Congressmen and senators, if they are not already billionaires who
bought their way into political office, can easily amass millions
in their retirement by joining lobby groups.
Not so civil servants or judges. By regulation, the salary of a
federal district court judge is pegged to the salary of a member of
Congress, now US$165,200 per annum. With that as the base, federal
appeals court judges get US$175,100, Supreme Court justices
US$203,000 and the CJ himself US$212,100.
The Chief's pay is less than half the President's. He earned more
than US$1 million in the private sector before he joined the bench.
His former law clerks would receive US$175,000 as first-year
associates at top law firms - about the same as an appellate court
judge's salary - not including a 'signing bonus' of US$200,000.
Within a few years, they would earn many multiples of their former
boss' salary.
The rest of US government service faces similar problems.
I know someone, a lawyer and an MBA, who works for an important
regulatory agency which monitors the futures markets. Because civil
servants cannot, by regulation, be paid more than the
Vice-President, whose salary is now US$202,900, the agency may soon
lose my friend.
Having regulators who aren't as smart as the regulated would not
make for good governance. Similarly, having judges less able than
the lawyers who appear before them would not make for a good legal
system.
It is no wonder that CJ Roberts is worried.
Geniuses like Virginia Woolf are different. They march to a
different drummer. They do not need or want much - just £500 a year
and a room of one's own, as she famously put it. And she would have
done what she did with less.
One cannot say the same of all public servants.
They serve, yes, but their service requires compensation, not
punishment. It is we, not our servants, who will suffer if we lose
the best and brightest among them to the private sector - or worse
still, to corruption.
In the final analysis, you get what you pay for - and it is best to
pay enough for what you want.
Excerpt from Janadas Devan's column in the Straits Times, 6
Jan
(http://straitstimes.asiaone.com/portal/site/STI/menuitem.7c5078e96529f8d48ace2810a06310a0/?vgnextoid=e34a3bac35429010VgnVCM1000000a35010aRCRD&vgnextfmt=vgnartid:94e9039d953ff010VgnVCM100000430a0a0aRCRD:vgnHasAuthorID:38021c805aaba010VgnVCM100000430a0a0aRCRD)
