What about a competitive salary they lose (i.e. get fired) if they underperform? We’re used to underpaying and overprotecting government employees but if you were setting up a new publicly owned company there’s no reason you’d have to do it that way.
It's already difficult to fire people in large businesses, but firing people from government is in a whole different level. Especially for performance unless we're talking about extreme underperformance or job abandonment.
What I’m saying is that a publicly owned company has a lot of flexibility in this regard. Employees are not government employees. It’s like a regular private company except the government is the sole shareholder.
My broader point here about self fulfilling prophecy is reflected in your comment: it has been this way, therefore must always be this way. That’s not true.
For example, the Federal civil service ("general service") pay scale tops out around $160k. This really doesn't make sense and costs the government multiples of market wages for hiring for roles where market pay is higher than this. One route is to hire that person via a contracting firm with a huge (double or triple) markup.
And of course the reason we don't just revamp the pay scales and pay market wages is because it's political suicide to pay people half a million or more at market rates.
The American people, on average, don't like the level of wage inequality in society. For any particular issue where you shove it in their faces (like proposing to pay the project lead "competitive salary"), you will get shouted down.
That's also why we get strange arrangements like Congress members making around $170k a year with legal insider trading. The insider trading money they make looks like "free" and isn't easily quantified.
Great connection you make on the insider trading! That never occurred to me despite recently being fed up with local mayoral candidates; looking at mayor comp and immediately noping out because a substantial paycut for the pleasure of dealing with the biggest BS imaginable seems rather unattractive.
