Leaving aside
the not entirely inconsequential fact that anyone who considers a salary of £60,000 a
year to be ‘peanuts’ isn’t inhabiting the same world as most of us, there are
at least two major fallacies with the argument.
The first is
that ‘attracting the best’ is not at all the same thing as ‘deterring the worst’. In the political world, what determines who
gets elected has more to do with the popularity of a particular party in a constituency than with the ability of the candidates. In the absence of any mechanism for
assessment of ability in the election process, any increase in salary could end
up, to over-work an already tired cliché, simply increasing the peanut ration
for the monkeys.
And the second
is that, even if we could agree on the definition of the word ‘ability’ (and
that’s a big question in itself), where is the evidence that paying higher
salaries attracts more of it? There’s
plenty of empirical evidence that higher salaries attract the greedy and the
reckless (just look at the banking sector), but I’ve not seen any that
justifies the claim that ‘ability’ follows money. Indeed, some of the most ‘able’ people I’ve
ever met have been academics and researchers; not amongst the highest paid in
society very often, but then it isn’t money which motivates them to apply their
ability in the way that they do.
In any event,
do we want laws made by people who have only been attracted into the legislature
by the high salaries paid? Doesn’t that
put a premium on those who are there for their own self-interest rather than
the interests of society as a whole?