The same can be accomplished by paying them market wages. In addition, it would provide a transparent accounting of expenditures and prevent politicians and union leaders and others from scamming taxpayers like they currently are.
> The same can be accomplished by paying them market wages.
No. Even with paying market wages, there can someone come along and flood the market with cheap money. Then the state has to massively counteract and waste taxpayer money.
Beamtentum is the core of German societal stability, as a result.
I don't know what "flooding with cheap money" means, but by definition, if a buyer is outbid by another buyer for something, then the market price has changed so the previous buyer needs to update to the new market price. I don't understand how this is a waste of taxpayer money, since it properly indicates to people where resources need to be shifted (in order to bring prices down). Without this market mechanism, you actually have a waste of taxpayer money since you don't know what you're overpaying/underpaying for.
The societal stability part should be offered to all taxpayers, not just government employees, so I don't see why that would be tied to an employer at all.
> I don't know what "flooding with cheap money" means, but by definition, if a buyer is outbid by another buyer for something, then the market price has changed so the previous buyer needs to update to the new market price.
Foreign money comes into a city and artificially (= not backed by local growth) drives up the prices, gobbles up the knowledge, then leaves. The city however is stuck with their now inadequately overpaid employees, which of course have every incentive to leave once the city inevitably tries to lower their pay again, thus basically holding the city at gunpoint: pay us or you shut down.
Just imagine how the finances of the Silicon Valley cities would be in that scenario - if they would go with the exorbitant pay rates for IT employees also for city staff, and another dotcom bust/financial crisis hits. The startups fold up, and the government is locked into now-enormous wages for the city employees.
And please don't act as if this wouldn't happen - half of SV economy / wealth is built up on dirt cheap Saudi blood money (as e.g. Uber and many others are finding out in the wake of the Khashoggi murder), and in Europe it's Chinese and Russian money instead of Saudi money. It's not a question of IF a bust happens, just WHEN. London is about to blow up in Brexit, I'm waiting for the chain reactions.
I'm not a fan of many German eccentric policies, but the Beamtentum is something that will keep the government running no matter how colossal the fuck-up. For example, something like the US gov't shutdowns is unimaginable here.
Paying someone more cash and paying someone with a lien on future taxpayer funds for their annuities during retirement is the same thing, except the prior actually gets accounted for. The reason that your scenario can even come to pass is because of the obfuscation of operating costs caused by inaccurate accounting.
If "cheap money" floods into a city and causes salaries to go up and competition to increase, then in the next budget, the city will find that it will have to raise taxes. This will make the city less desirable for the "cheap money", hence reducing it. The reason you even see floods of money is because of arbitrage opportunities, and those are reduced when you have quicker price discovery.
