Steven Greenhut on Excessive Public Pay

Public Domain

"The art of government is to make two-thirds of the nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third," mused Voltaire. Even that cynical French Enlightenment writer couldn't imagine what would transpire one day in California, where a portion of the mere 15.3 percent of the public that works for government has gotten the rest of the public to pay for an eye-popping level of compensation. Increasingly, writes Steven Greenhut, the public may be seeing that the problem isn't a handful of officials who illegally gamed the system, but a system that'"as Voltaire understood'"allows a powerful minority to legally game the majority.