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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   27655 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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There is another reason:

  1. To be able to deploy into government extremely-competent people whose market-clearing rate of compensation is far in excess of the pathetic sums we pay the civil service.

This works by ensuring that the people you want to be available to serve in government have a job waiting for them at think tanks or lobbying firms when they get out -- arranging the proverbial revolving door such that their total expected compensation over one full revolution is not too far below what they could earn

This is really not a joke -- if you are advocating in favor of and you want to advance it with moderately-competent people, you are are competing against a market clearing price for that competence. You can ignore that and get the kind of competence the Civil Service is gonna pay for and you're gonna get the amount of actual movement that entails.

And for the folks in the (2) of the above, this is a reasonable way to spend money. Want to get folks reporting to the Director of the FTC whose FMV compensation is more than $150K (lol, this is half a baby lawyer's salary at BigLaw or anyone doing any kind of strategy or execution at an F500 firm) -- pony up. Money well spent, a couple of cracked operators int he right spot can do more than armies of mediocrities.

I'd definitely include that in what I said above about "having a standing army" for a political ideology. Good elaboration on the point though.

To be able to deploy into government extremely-competent people whose market-clearing rate of compensation is far in excess of the pathetic sums we pay the civil service.

This is the way I have heard it described by think-tankers: Democratic shadow governments reside in universities, Republican shadow governments reside in think tanks (which are really just right-wing counter-institutions to the left-wing dominated universities in the first place).

Nah. Both of the shadow governments reside in K street where they work for a firm lobbying their former agency.

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