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Shame I agree, alas the state doesn't fund jobs where these people can actually make a difference with salaries anywhere near the ballpark of what high finance pays. They don't even have to match the pay, just provide something that doesn't make it look like one is working for free and is "respectable", even paying 50-60% of high finance would be enough to pull a lot of people over to working for the public good rather than playing zero sum financial games. But hey, the common man would throw a tantrum if it turned out the British state was paying clever 22 year olds 3x the salary of the prime minister to improve things and generate an order of magnitude extra value for society than what they're getting paid, even if it were below what that 22 year could get on the open market. I don't blame the government, at least not directly; they still have enough smart people to know what's what. I blame the populace who make it politically impossible for the government to do what's optimal.
Increasingly I disagree. You can actually achieve the same outcome by not paying people at all.
Imagine if all the senior positions in the government, MPs, ministerial positions but also the most senior civil servants were all completely unpaid. Then implement a maximum age of 55. Keep the same exam.
The civil service would be staffed entirely by the children of the rich who are committed to public service, plus a few people sponsored by the unions (who, again, are already in politics). You would get some champagne socialists, but you get them already anyway. Most importantly, you’d cut out all the strivers. Let a man make his money and then send his son to parliament.
It wouldn’t even increase corruption, since the corrupt will be so anyway on a current civil service salary.
Your proposed model is actually not too dissimilar to what used to be the case before 1911. MPs used to be unpaid before that point and the civil service was mostly gentlemen of independent means or (more regularly) their sons. It sort of worked because everyone involved was mostly properly educated and formed and despite the usual minor corruption was genuinely invested in seeing Britain stay Great.
The Roman Republic was surprsingly similar as well, the cursus honorum was ruinously expensive for everyone apart from the top patricians and therefore the people who took those positions didn't have much of an incentive to loot the state unless they were trying to prefigure Crassus or something (which of course didn't work out).
The problem is that this only works when the people at the top who take these jobs are properly forged and not merely selected. These people went to Eton and Harrow followed by Oxford before taking on their government posts and back then this was a proper rigorous education in the classical Trivium and Quadrivium. Back then these institutions didn't make you run the rat race to get in, if your stock was good and you could pay (or even if you couldn't but were academically excellent, Newton went to Cambridge on the back of nothing but his own intelligence in the 17th Century) you were in. The prestige you got from graduating form these places came from what they taught you and put you through, not because you were chosen by admissions committees as being worthy from amongst the huddled masses yearning to be given entry.
These people were formed properly before their public service began and this formation was necessary for them to do a good job. However today who are the sons of the rich by and large? With few exceptions it's mostly people who made their money in finance and technology, people who don't have much "institutional pedigree" in the intellectual sense and got where they are through "sharp practice" which of course percolates down to their children's mindset as well.
Their upbringing by and large consists of expensive private schools that optimize relentlessly for university admissions: little Johnny should do 8 weeks working in a lab with Prof. X on Drosphilla not because he cares one whit about cellular biology but because if he gets his name on a paper doing something menial but necessary then that will help him get his admission at Princemouth after which he's basically set for life. Handing governance to this class on the theory that their wealth frees them from financial incentive is like handing surgery to someone on the theory that their steady hands free them from the need for medical training.
What is far better is to have the formation without the careerism. The solution isn't to make the positions unpaid so that only the rich need apply but rather to make the formation so demanding and the culture so oriented toward duty that the careerists self-select out. ENA at its best did exactly this: the sortie, the ranking system, the culture of public service, all of it was designed to filter out people who were merely ambitious and retain people who were ambitious for the right reasons. That it failed to do so perfectly is not an argument against the principle, merely against the execution, and certainly not justification for giving it the chop.
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A man could take a year's savings or even less and try to make effective changes to their place of origin, as well. Instead of abandoning it in favor of zero sum absurdities.
Those "effective changes to their place of origin" aren't limited by money or (usually) even talent. They're limited because those in power at the place of origin are actively preventing them from happening.
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