So show me the apples and show me the oranges. You really want to claim that clerks at the courthouse or DMV rate the wages (and benefits) of a four-year Business degree? Or that school administrators warrant a six-figure salary (and benefits)? That's a pretty tough sell in my book. I'm not saying they have to be equivalent across the board, but the differentiation is SO big that to claim justification based on free market dynamics is ridiculous. If it were the free market, the company known as "California" would have been forced to declare bankruptcy more than a decade ago at least. Instead, they keep paying outrageous salaries and racking up huge deficits in promised benefits liabilities that they can't pay for despite the fact that they have the highest taxes in the nation (except for New York).

True, but the confidence interval is an indicator of how representative the average is of the general trend, is it not? And standard deviations represent the volume of a population in proximity to the mean. I understand the need to examine the method of study/evaluation, but if you want to persuade me that the argument made by the author is severely flawed, you're going to have to provide better data to support your position - not merely attack the methodology.

If we compare the average of government salary and wages against the average of citizen salary and wages and find a significant discrepancy, we absolutely should make sure we are not comparing apples and oranges - I'm not trying to argue that. But prima facie it seems pretty reasonable to me to expect that if you include the entire range of public servants' salaries and benefits and compare them to the entire range of private salaries, the indications of a market-based system would argue that the two distributions would be similar - the one being a subset of the other. If a disparity existed, it would be an indicator that one of the two systems was not representative of a market-based system.

I understand what you are trying to say, but we're talking about standard deviations, and those are going to tighten up substantially as your sample size increases. In a sample of two or three, the standard deviation is massive. In a sample size of a couple million, not so much.

If you are looking at averages, however, isn't the one going to mirror the other? The vast majority of government employees aren't CPA's in the Budget office. And while I agree that their wage rates should be comparable to the private sector, that too should even out when taken on aggregate. California's aren't even close.

The biggest problem I see are the government pension plans. Those need to be privatized and individualized so that politicians don't have that money to use as a slush fund.

A second indicator would be the overall tax burden upon citizens. California's high taxes stifle job growth. A third would be regulatory environment.

Do you really think average salaries of government workers should be higher than that of the people paying their wage?

Personally, I believe that is one of the reasons property taxes are so far out of line. The vast majority of governments expense is labor and when the average wage is higher that the payers it creates issues with people's ability to pay. Also, in the private sector, benefits are considered part of the pay package and so should it be in government.