Everything old is new again, Part 1

Alert readers of the news will have noted the kerfuffle about the salaries being paid by Illinois’ new governor to his  senior staff, in particular the 100 Gs being paid to equip Mrs. R with a chief of staff to help her discharge her non-existent duties. 

Like most news of this sort, it isn’t very new. Return with me if you will to those sylvan days of 1986, when there appeared in these pages a column in my Prejudices series titled “Acolytes” (January 16-22, 1986) (not, alas, available on-line). I wrote in part 

Mike Lawrence, the Lee Newspapers’
estimable man in the statehouse, took up the issue of aides’ salaries in a
column last October. He noted that a dozen top Thompson aides, for instance,
were being paid more than $50,000, and that a number of others under the age of
thirty are paid anywhere from $37,000 to $45,000. Lawrence implied that there
is nothing that a kid under thirty (what he called the “relatively
unripened”) is likely to know that makes him or her worth $40,000.
Apparently there are those in the government who agree; one of Thompson’s
Wunderkind was hired to run his Build Illinois program, which prompted someone
to remark within hearing of the Chicago Tribune that the bonds will mature
before the director does.

In a world which does not blanch at
paying a Ph.D. in education $97,800 a year plus benefits (as the present state
school superintendent is paid), salaries paid to department heads and
legislative liaisons and research staffs and top policy analysts and the like
may seem modest enough. Lawrence is hardly the first statehouse journalist to
raise an eyebrow at pay patterns; a few years ago the State Journal-Register’s
Al Manning . . . similarly questioned their
propriety.

The governor, school board, and
others responsible for setting executive and academic pay standards profess
themselves helpless victims of market pressures. Their argument goes like this:
1) Government needs talented men and women; 2) the private sector does too,
therefore; 3) public salaries must be kept roughly on a par with pace-setting
private sector salaries in order to get and keep good people.

Like most axioms about government, this one is plausible
without being quite accurate. The private sector is not very well run either,
which suggests that pay and proficiency are not dependably linked. More to the
point, while it is true that “better money-better people” approach
has stripped Illinois government of most of those colorful corruptions which so
offend the middle class (polite Springfield today feels only slight compunction
about inviting a legislator or lobbyist to their homes) better money has not
bought that much better government. Bringing the middle class into government
has made government not better, only more middle class. And it has done so at
some sacrifice of efficiency: The bosses ran the show, true, but at least the
show got run, which has not been true during the last twenty years or so of
governmental near-paralysis, drift, and vacillation.

Still more to the point is the fact
that the rewards of public service are only partly material. What does a job as
a deputy assistant something-or-other mean to a damp-eared college grad? It
can’t be just the money after all; a really hot young talent wouldn’t move to
Springfield for a hundred grand. What he does get is worth much, much more. He
gets to boss people around, including some who are older than he is. He gets
his own business cards. People feel compelled to laugh at his jokes (even if
they are making better ones behind his back). He gets to pose as well-informed
before a press which doesn’t know the difference. He is listened to, courted,
deferred to, seduced. He gets to park close to the door, send memos, see his
name on reports he didn’t have to write, maybe even ride in helicopters with
the governor, all this while his classmates from pre-law days are still
learning how to rig old ladies’ wills. He is too inexperienced to quite realize
that his authority derives entirely from his position and not his person. Pay?
He ought to pay the state to have so much fun.

That suggestion, of course, has been made. When historians look back on Thompson, searching for some summative
phrase—something to match Altgeld’s Lone Eagle or even Walker’s “the
people’s governor”—they may settle on The Spoiled Brat. The argument over
appropriate salaries for public employes has suffered because most such jobs
have no clear counterpart in the private sector which might offer a standard. A
few years ago the governor, in a celebrated moment of pique, sniffed, ‘I’m not
a clerk.” Indeed he is not. But neither is he the precise equivalent of a
chief executive officer of a $12 billion-a-year corporation, as he likes to
style himself. (For one thing he shares responsibility for running Illinois
with coequal bodies such as the General Assembly. For another, if one considers
services as well as cash, Thompson’s compensation package bulges quite amply.) 

. . . . Lawrence referred to Thompson staffers as
“acolytes,” and indeed raises are given much like benefices. Or, to
shift metaphors, the governor bestows raises on favored courtiers much the way
indulgent monarchs used to give away duchies. While no king, a governor can
nevertheless bestow titles, as is evidenced by the number of major departments
and commissions now headed by former members of Thompson’s personal staff.

Thompson’s bright young things
could indeed do better in the private sector. Corruption has always created its
own markets. Honesty may be the best policy (I refer here to honesty as a moral
category, not a legal one) but the money is better in corporate law or public
relations. (Often the fat salaries former aides and administrators command buy
their contacts—a genteel form of pimping.) Judging a job by what you can get
out of it seems a poor philosophy for public service. A government—and here I
do not speak only of Thompson’s, which in many respects is better than most—which
cannot attract its more able citizens without recourse to extravagant bribes
confirms its rottenness.

This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2015.