Why should politicians not be incentivised with huge salaries and enormous expenses?

THE GREAT enabler of corruption in public life is the idea that “they’re all at it”. But what if we were to go one step further and suggest that they all should be at it? Or even further again and say that those who are not “at it”, who are not for sale, are the dangerous ones who should be rooted out?

These notions would surely be regarded as bonkers – which they are. But they’re not marginal. On the contrary they’re right at the heart of the way public institutions in Ireland and elsewhere are now run. Unless we challenge them, we will never be able to deal with the corruption of public life.

Faced with something such as the Mahon report, we tend to look inwards, at our own culture, political system and lack of civic morality – as we should. But hidden in this introspection is a belief that obscures a larger truth. We imagine that corruption is about the lingering on of something old, something that has no place in shiny new modernity. If only we can become properly modern, none of this stuff will happen. But what if the dominant form of modernity is one that holds that the pursuit of personal advantage is the only possible motivating force in public life?

If this idea seems outrageous, ask yourself a question: do you work in an organisation dominated by “targets” and “incentives”? If you do, you’re part of the world invented by a group of American-based mathematicians and economists during the cold war. Their view is that human beings are isolated, coldly rational creatures, programmed to seek only their own advantage. They get resources by ruthlessly competing with each other.

Everything else – altruism, “the public interest”, “public service”, is an illusion. Those who believe in such notions are either idiots or – in this mentality, more admirably – hypocrites, using rhetoric to mask their real goal of personal advantage.

This view of human nature was applied to politics and public administration by James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize for what he called “public choice” theory. Buchanan is an enormously influential figure – his idea that all public services should operate as marketplaces governed by numbers (targets) and greed (incentives) has become reality.

Buchanan’s view is that public life is exactly like, say, the car market – everyone acts as an individual ruthlessly pursuing his or her private self-interest. Nobody is truly motivated by collective public goals. In Adam Curtis’s brilliant BBC documentary series The Trap, Buchanan says, “There is certainly no measurable concept that can be called ‘the public interest’.”

It follows that politicians and civil servants who evoke the concept are either fools or hypocrites and should therefore be kept well away from power. The corollary is not just that individual greed is the sole motivating force in public life, but that politicians and bureaucrats who believe otherwise are dangerous.

Buchanan labels them “zealots”: “We’re safer if we have politicians who are a bit self-interested and greedy than if we have these zealots. The greatest danger is the zealot who thinks that he or she knows what’s best for the rest of us, as opposed to being for sale, so to speak.

“The zealot is not nearly as influenced by monetary incentives or the incentives of office . . . as the nonzealot, so you don’t want too many zealots in there.”

The idea that we are best served by politicians who are greedy and who are for sale may seem outlandish. But it’s a logical extension of all of the rest of Buchanan’s beliefs, which have become so ubiquitous that they’re practically invisible.

The belief that the only things that matter are numbers and the only way to motivate people is through incentives and bonuses worked its way in everywhere from private companies to

public institutions such as the Civil Service, universities and the health system, right down, for example, to the number of minutes a home help may spend helping an elderly person to dress.

The wider consequences of this bleak, joyless and paranoid view of humanity can be argued over. But the central idea that there is no such thing as the common good or an honest ethic of public service legitimises corruption.

It is not about recognising the truth that some individuals in public life are motivated by greed or that public bureaucracies have a tendency to develop their own corporate interests which must be constantly checked by scrutiny and accountability. It claims, rather, that these are the only possible values and that people who believe otherwise are not just useless but dangerous.

Thus, it is not enough to pay senior civil servants a good salary – they must be incentivised to reach their targets by giving them an extra slice of the pie as well.

So why shouldn’t politicians also “incentivise” themselves with inflated salaries, huge expenses, luxury trips and the odd private bonus from grateful citizens?

Once you dismantle the idea of public service as a noble thing in itself, all you’ve got left is greed. Corruption isn’t really corruption any more – it’s honest self-motivation.