Perspective on Public Employees, from Saigon

The unfinished Saigon skyscraper is a cautionary tale.  Americans need to learn its lessons, but we might not.

We want honest government but we bash bureaucrats.

Yesterday's post told the story of the billion dollar scar on the skyline of Saigon. 

It is a 50-story unfinished building, showing a standoff between investors from the USA, Britain, Japan, and Singapore, where there are corrupt practices laws that prohibit offering bribes to foreign government employees and contractors to get projects approved and built, and various government officials with expectations of "considerations" to get projects completed.  No doubt the situation is complicated and accusations go back and forth over who is corrupt and who isn't.  Bottom line: corruption in government is a well acknowledged problem that everyone says needs to end--yet it continues in many parts of the world.

In America we pay public employees.  Many people are comfortable bashing "government bureaucrats", which--once one thinks carefully about it--means they are criticizing government employees whose fidelity is to the publically accountable rules and procedures of their department.  They are rules-followers.  They obey the law.  They don't bend and cheat in order to favor one person over another, they aren't supposed to play favorites, they don't make up their own rules, they don't take bribes.  They are loyal to the bureau, with its rules publically and lawfully established.

Isn't that actually what we want?

Don't we want honest employees, people devoted to doing their job, not people loyal to whatever inducements are provided by whomever comes along?   Don't we want clean government, not corrupt government?   And wouldn't it be most likely, if government employees were allowed to make up rules on the spot that they would be enormously tempted--indeed almost required--to bend in the direction of wealthy and powerful influences and against any generally accepted public interest??  After all, a building inspector who obeys the law expects to be backed up by his boss when he tells a powerful building contractor that the steel in a foundation is undersized and unsafe, but if the boss and the boss' boss are all free to be flexible and ignore the law then the employee learns that his real job is to "get along" and please the powers-that-be, not obey the formal rules.

Paying government employees well is the price of having honest government.  It is in the interest of the public for government employees to have jobs worth keeping, and worth keeping honest in order to keep. We want them to have a long term perspective, with a good pension as a reward for honest service.   If the public does not value the jobs well enough to have the openly acknowledged salary and benefits be the actual payment for the work, then the people are sending a dangerous alternative signal: that the actual compensation for the job comes "from off the books" from somewhere other than the acknowledged source.

We can see on the Saigon skyline what that looks like: a system of favors and considerations and  bribes made by people with unaccountable influence--not a system of rules created through legitimate means.  If we don't have a system of law, administered by employees who obey the law, then we will have a system run by people of invisible influence, pulling strings for the benefit of the people with money, influence, or the threat of violence.

We choose.  We get what we pay for.