This is a self fulfilling prophecy. Whether the services are like you describe is largely a function of government competence, attention to detail, culture etc. Compare the Greek Internal Revenue Service to the German one. One did not manage to collect even basic taxes on a population that actually had a lot of real estate property, the other one has a pretty good track record (far from perfect of course). When it mattered the Ecole de Mines (A french grand ecole) produced some of the best mine inspectors, that had a fantastic salary (Poincare was one of them).
If you run your country properly and efficiently, none of the things that you mention
must be true. This is really a question of mindset and culture, nothing more.
Of course rich people and their lap dogs, like Milton Friedman would like you to
believe differently. Ultimately if the private sector outcompetes the public sector
for (most of) the best and brightest, you will end up in a situation like in the US. At various
points in time, you could not achieve much higher prestige than being an elite public servant
in France (all the grand ecoles recruited for that) or be part of the diplomatic corps in
Germany. Some of these positions still have very competitive salary to this day.
Hopefully converting government services to digital services (the German government is planning to do this for all of its ~500 functions over the next decade) will eliminate a lot of the lower / middle management in the administration.
> If you run your country properly and efficiently
Have you ever wondered why very large companies are run inefficiently and have a lot of bureaucratic morass in them, while startups and small businesses actually get things done?
Now compare the size of the United States' landmass, population, and GDP vs. individual European countries.
There was a time when the United States' model was supposed to be like the European Union, with strong individual states governed by a national body, where each state would have wide latitude over how they conducted their business. In such an alignment, you might see examples of efficiency (Germany) and examples of stupidity (Greece). Alas, this is not the direction the US decided to go, and instead has a pretty inefficient strong national state that gets very little done specifically because of its size.
Perhaps ironically, the Federal government's bureaucratic approach to equitable pay is why public-sector jobs are not competitive in the United States. Why would a talented person work for a fraction of the pay that the private sector offers?
Of course the federal government might legitimately need higher average skill levels than the rest of the economy does. I wonder how that ratio, $76,810 / $51,960, compares to the ratio in other countries, particularly those with a reputation for being well-governed.
That's a useless comparison, you can't just take the mean over all workers like that. The Federal government employs a larger percentage of skilled workers, and a smaller percentage of burger-flippers, than the workforce as a whole.
So all we have to do is get a significant number of Americans to buy into the right culture and wait for the effects to manifest themselves in federal government? What a brilliantly trivial solution! Why has no one considered this before?
If you suggested to a European that a French person and a Serbian were the same and should be governed as such, they would find that assertion ridiculous.
Yet people throw rocks at "Americans" as if your average person from Oregon is at all similar to your average person from Mississippi.
>As if your average person from Oregon is at all similar to your average person from Mississippi.
They are. Speaking as someone that has lived in California, Kentucky, Maryland, Maine, New York and Florida - the average person in each of these states is almost exactly the same.
> Hopefully converting government services to digital services (the German government is planning to do this for all of its ~500 functions over the next decade) will eliminate a lot of the lower / middle management in the administration.
And provide a nice supply of testers! Nothing can beat German efficiency!!
If you run your country properly and efficiently, none of the things that you mention must be true. This is really a question of mindset and culture, nothing more. Of course rich people and their lap dogs, like Milton Friedman would like you to believe differently. Ultimately if the private sector outcompetes the public sector for (most of) the best and brightest, you will end up in a situation like in the US. At various points in time, you could not achieve much higher prestige than being an elite public servant in France (all the grand ecoles recruited for that) or be part of the diplomatic corps in Germany. Some of these positions still have very competitive salary to this day.
Hopefully converting government services to digital services (the German government is planning to do this for all of its ~500 functions over the next decade) will eliminate a lot of the lower / middle management in the administration.