(December 27, 2011 at 9:11 pm)Tiberius Wrote: I think that's possibly a very bad idea. Salary should reflect the importance of the job, and governing is an important job, so it should have a good salary. People who go for the job should be the people who are most qualified, but also who are doing it for the people, and not for themselves. So a better idea would be to set the salary at somewhere at average to (just) above average wage; it won't make the people who run for government rich, but it won't leave them with hardly any money for what they do either.
Sure, but greed is greed.
The less a government employee is paid, the more likely someone with a fistfull of cash is going to convince said employee to see things his way.
I'm not arguing that government employees should be paid exhorberant amounts of money, but I'm saying that the power of government is going to attract corruption regardless of their paycheck.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
