Steven Greenhut on Excessive Public Pay

“The
art of government is to make two-thirds of the nation pay all it
possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third,” mused
Voltaire. Even that cynical French Enlightenment writer couldn’t
imagine what would transpire one day in California, where a portion
of the mere 15.3 percent of the public that works for government
has gotten the rest of the public to pay for an eye-popping level
of compensation. Increasingly, writes Steven Greenhut, the public
may be seeing that the problem isn’t a handful of officials who
illegally gamed the system, but a system that—as Voltaire
understood—allows a powerful minority to legally game the
majority.

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