> The entire "essential worker" hero ad campaign at the start of COVID really put a bad taste in my mouth.

The US does the same with their military. Drape the flag over everything, trip over themselves thanking people for service, giving 10% military discounts and giving home loans with 3% down payments....but should we pay the armed forces a competitive wage? No. It’s even more cringe when all this service stuff is then extended to police and firefighters.

As if there are two classes of people in the country, those sacrificing themselves and willingly accepting less money to “serve” their country, when it’s really just their only option because all the business left their town or they messed up in high school.

I don’t ever want to be paid with “thanks” or “hero worship”. I’ll take the cash.

Oddly enough, I’ve noticed this even down at my level as a teenager who worked as water-park lifeguard last summer. We had two months of rigorous training before we could even start work, and because the park I worked at was huge and very safety oriented, our job was actually very mentally and physically taxing, much more so than, say, that of a cashier.

We were paid 50 cents above minimum wage, and it wasn’t until just recently that I realized what was going on: the park was leveraging the social status associated with being a guard in order to pay us much less than we deserved for such a demanding job. They substituted “hero worship” (like you mentioned) for the cash our labor was actually worth.

I quit a month before the season ended and don’t intend to go back.

Some jobs have non-pecuniary benefits, such as social status or personal gratification; these mean that people are willing to do the work for less than they otherwise would (even to the point of making the position volunteer-only). I am not sure what someone 'deserves' for being a lifeguard, or any other job with substantial non-pecuniary benefits, but these things should be taken into account.

so an inverse compensating differential

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensating_differential

“Should we pay the armed forces a competitive wage?”

Have you looked into what the armed forces pays? It’s not bad.

Even as a low ranking enlisted person, you get housing, healthcare and then a salary (albeit low, but it’s mostly discretionary). You can qualify for the GI Bill which pays for schooling once you get out. And if you’re in for 20, you get a pension and healthcare with the option of retiring at 40 if you went in at 20.

I believe you also get a housing allowance is you qualify to live off base and if you serve in a combat zone, a big chunk of pay is tax exempt.

I’m sure someone will be along to correct my inaccuracies.

If you add it all up, a military career is by no means a poor financial choice.

Armed forces pay is way, way less than the competitive pay paid to the same people to perform the same job as employees of private companies.

That's true of government jobs in general.

But what about total compensation, including all benefits?

You can't find a private job with a pension plan any more.

A pension plan isn’t magic, it is just a fixed-income security. You can buy them on the private market. A pension can thus be converted to a dollar value and compared to a private sector job.

Total compensation is decent in the military, but imo it’s definitely not work the risks to life and limb if deployed. Any good soldier could probably make a lot more in the private sector for the same amount of work hours and stress.

I don’t know that this is true for all government jobs... I know that California and especially San Francisco have (or had) lavish compensation programs.

I agree entirely. You also need look no further than veteran treatment to see this exact behavior exhibited by government and many average citizens. Thrown into training, paid a compensation for what is essentially their life/health, throw into harms way, and then pushed in a closet once they've been used, thrown a few scraps to keep going.

Is it still an uncompetitive wage when you:

1. Don't require housing etc money

2. Are ranked up to any degree higher than random POG

?

Even with BAH, a commission, a higher rank, and lots of time in service, on average you still typically make significantly less than private industry.

However, it is predictable. If you aren't super career minded and are on track to be stuck at minimum wage for a long time, then the military provides a lot of structure and probably higher compensation.

If you have the option to get into a tech/finance/etc high paying career, then there's no contest. Entry level engineer at big tech companies make about the same wage as an O6 living in a high cost of living area and like 20++ years in service. Once you get promoted once, you're making more than a general.

Lower compensation than private sector is not specific to the military. It is true of most government positions.

Typical offsetting factors that rational agents weigh include pensions, education subsidies and other benefits, job stability, and perceived upward mobility.

True - and for some areas of government it can be crazy. Someone working tech on GS really needs to want to work in government, because they're making 3-5x less.

What is really crazy to me is financial regulators on GS schedule.

And federal government pays well compared to a lot of local stuff.

I don’t see any of my well educated, well heeled peers recommending their children to join the military. Because their children have better options.

That may be your bubble.

There are plenty of people going to Ivy League schools who have military backgrounds.

Going to one of the military schools is highly prestigious. They aren’t easy to get into in the least.

You ignored the entire middle class.

Which is it? Their only option, or a non-competitive wage?

If there aren’t any buyers, $1 is a competitive offer.

Also, to your last sentence: check out whatever they're calling Blackwater these days.

> Few if any of the businesses that ran those ad campaigns actually cared about their workers

Agreed, but ultimately the responsibility to care for all citizens should fall on the government first.

Anyone who lives in a country should feel supported and cared for by their government. That's literally why it exists.

Employers should certainly care for their employees as well, but that should be an added benefit, not the primary safety net.

> Anyone who lives in a country should feel supported and cared for by their government. That's literally why it exists.

That would be nice, but that is not our world. A country and by extension a government is a historical institution created by a governing class: a monarchy or created through war land boundary. The citizens of a nation, until the US attempted, did not have any say in their country's destiny. That was entirely controlled by the ruling class.

The concept of a nation authentically caring for its own citizens is completely modern.

> Anyone who lives in a country should feel supported and cared for by their government. That's literally why it exists.

This is the opposite of the libertarian / conservative philosophy, which is that government should have no role in people's lives and people should support themselves -- government's just a referee for disputes.

And yet those same people still use the infrastructure, and benefit from the stability and security, that their government provides.

So one could argue that it's an unrealistic "philosophy" that is just used to provide cover for said people's selfish bullshit.

There’s nothing selfish about wishing to be left alone, and not be forced to do things to which one does not consent, and not be forced to buy things which one does not want to buy.

Also, when born into a system that forces you, on threat of violence, to participate in it, there is no peaceful alternative that permits an opt out, so saying that those people benefit (in your view) when they have no other option, is extremely disingenuous. Do people also benefit from the war on drugs being waged against them?

There are lots of legitimate critiques of libertarianism. Neither the false dichotomy nor the ad hominem you offered are among them.

Not everyone agrees that that particular form of stability and security that you seem to think is such a huge benefit is worth the cost: specifically, that every person alive in a certain region must be forced, on threat of violence, to pay and participate in that stability-providing system, even if they vehemently do not consent to such.

Perhaps you value stability and security above all else, and think it’s a good deal. Others that do not, and consider the price (morally, in the legitimization of armed robbery, to say nothing of the dollar figure) too high, are not being selfish by having those values.

Libertarianism is not the opposite of “socially interdependent”. It’s the opposite of “forced at the point of a gun”.

The tiniest fiddle in the world is playing for you.

It's easy to have these bullshit opinions when you're a white male adult who didn't get eaten by wolves at 5 months old because there was a whole society and social structure that allowed you to safely grow up into the adult you are now.

And now that you've benefited from all that society has given to you in order for you to be where you are today, you want to opt out?

Pay back every dollar spent on you by everyone else, since you were born, and only then you can go live alone in the mountains..

So as a libertarian I should be expected to pay taxes I don't want to pay AND build my own roads on my own? Should I also produce my own water? This is ridiculous. These things become impossible to do precisely because we're in this situation.

I'd say we've been trying that in the US, and it hasn't been working. The richest have captured enough systems to further enrich them that there's no undoing that -- and reducing the government to a referee certainly won't do that.

It honestly baffles me that libertarians can look at the US as it is now and think, "if the government were smaller, life would be better for everyone." I don't see the connection to the two at all, even if I try to follow the libertarian reasoning.

The issue for me is that the federal government is notoriously inefficient. They have no external pressure to be efficient since they have no skin in the game. Don't misunderstand me; i'm not saying there aren't huge issues we need to solve in this country like the broken health care system or the rising inequality gap, but I've never seen any data that indicates giving the government more control and money would solve these societal problems. The US gov't already spends significantly more on health care per capita than other similarly wealthy nations[1].

[1]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

The best summary of this was a Tweet I saw saying something like “I see a billboard that says I’m an essential worker and a paycheck that says I’m not.”

What was their paycheck?

Most likely, minimum wage

The task is essential. The specific person carrying out that task is not.

The pay reflects the cost of completing the task.