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EU institutions are just as regulatory captured as everywhere else. The EU bureaucracy is horribly inefficient with tons of unfirable "human drones" making 2x for the same role one does in the the private market, where they just do 1/10x of the work. The only reason EU is not quite as corrupt as USA is ironically because all the competing rich fuckers of each nation are competing with each other's lobbying
I don't really understand why paying government workers a living wage is a bad thing here?
I am not familiar with the statistics in Europe, but do government employees really make 2x as much as private sector? And if so, are they really doing 1/10th of the work? Those numbers seem absurd.
"Inefficient" bureaucracy, and a well-paid work force, does not equal corruption.
government employees rarely make more than private employees.
what they are getting mixed up is that some tenured positions get paid about 2x that of a new employee, because there are still some old contracts around that are simply much better than newer one in terms of pay raises over time.
and those older government contracts frequently include provisions that make these employees contracts impossible to terminate, resulting in some government employees that simply sit out their time on a stupidly inflated salary that nobody can fire...yes, that's as bad as it sounds, but those contracts are, as far as im aware, no longer being offered anywhere, and the last ones to get those contracts are going to age out into retirement very soon. most are already retired.
it's not related to corruption at all either, these contracts used to be standard in many governments all over the world, europe just happened to have some of the cushiest jobs associated with them...
but it is true that these employees generally contributed a LOT to governmental inefficiencies...which is why they're no longer available.
I'm not confusing anything. Even as lately as 10 and 5 years ago, internal wages for EU-staff (I'm talking about EU itself, not nation states) were easily 2x the agency staff wages, when all the benefits are included. And yes, internal staff is by all accounts unfirable except in grossly egregious situations. It's just that permanent positions like this a lot of times go through a what I call a "hazing" period, where the to-be-internal has to go through multiple "short term hiring" cycles, before getting a permanent contract.
alright, then we're talking about slightly different things: i was talking exclusively about the similar kind of government contracts...those are, afaik, almost entirely gone.
the EU contracts i know nothing about, but it's gonna create the same problems if they're structured similarly to the local governmental ones...
I've worked a lot in the EU public sector and I generally don't have a problem with paying people a living wage, but is constantly happening within the EU bureaucracy is that the ones that are "internals" don't do enough work (if at all), so they end up outsourcing to local agencies which then pay people the bare minimum they can get away with to do the job the internals won't or can't do. And yes, it's easily 2x if one includes all the benefits EU workers get.
I wouldn't mind if they just got more money than the agencies, but I do mind that they think they're superior to the agency staff and often treat said staff like second class citizens, if they're not acting like petty tyrants even.
Finally my corruption comment was independent of my bureaucracy comment, not following from it.
We have less corruption because our bureaucracy is horribly inefficient.
If they want to bribe someone, they need to bribe a ton of people making it more costly and more visible.
Want to know what an efficient bureaucracy looks like? A dictatorship.
It might be unpopular opinion, but I firmly believe that Inefficiencies in the bureaucracy is a good thing considering alternatives. It acts like a buffer, redundancies are in effect acting like checks and balances, and it's way harder to break or subvert than the one without redundancy.
And money that spent on it are such a minuscule percentage of overall spendings, it worth it in the end
While it may act as a buffer for reactionaries sometimes, it also serves as a way to stymie progressive politics for the same reasons.
Looking at some other governmental examples, I am happy to take this drawback. I think stopping another Trump or Putin is more important than improving. It's obviously important to do both, but if there is a choice...
Yeah it's not a binary choice. We don't have to accept either stagnation (i.e. slow cooking towards fascism) or fascism speedrun.
To be honest, looking at everything that is happening in the world, we have a uniary choice of being happy that fascism is sometimes slow.
I am not even remotely optimistic fornthe future
That's just nihilist defeatism. There's always something we can do, and it doesn't have to be super radical either. It just takes a lot of people not playing the rigged game.
It already took a bunch of people "not playing the rigged game" to allow those who played to win by default. Now we're fucked and can only mitigate the disaster, and since we can't aggree on how anyway, we can't do even that. The arc of the moral whatever is slow but it bends towards the destruction if civilization.
The point of it being a rigged game, is that those would win by default either way. We were fucked so long as people are expecting parliamentary democracy to fix systemic issues and do nothing else to directly improve their situations.
We don't have to all agree on how to fix things, we just have to do direct action to fix things for ourselves and those close to us, and it incidentally tends to fix the system as well.
Nihilistic apathy just leads to more suffering but it's incidentally exactly what the system expects of you, which is why parliamentarism is set up the way it is.
That's not stuff we're not ready to hear though; we all know that.