The abusive stock-profits of these SEC employees is not an isolated event. The enormous difference in salary levels and wealth accumulation around DC vs the rest of the country over the last few years should be a clue.
Similar disparities in economic fate --between government employees and those they perceive as subjects-- are visible in most Western European countries I know well.
As our societies have gotten wealthier, governments have grown in disproportion -- and opportunities for steady income (including very early retirement) and indirect graft have increased.
What a load of crap. While it is true that the number of government employees tends to be higher in more prosperous countries (e.g. OECD), the total share of wages going to government employees is lower and therefore the (relative) wages per government employee must be much lower. Check out table 3 on page 9 of this:
It's disgraceful that SEC employees seem to be engaged in insider trading, but to extrapolate there to "government employees and those they perceive as subjects" is quite literally insane.
I think we're using different lenses. The WorldBank stats you reference are very restrictive, being limited to central government employees in the 90s. But today's actual government cost is more than that.
If we look at recent OECD and local numbers for what one would more expansively consider the "public sector" the proportions are much higher in e.g. Sweden [1] and Greece [2]. Further, I would suggest that to measure the full impact of government on society, one should include the pension costs of retired public sector employees (one of the major driver in the PIGS crisis in recent years) as well as public works contractors (e.g. hundreds of millions of dollars for recently failed IT projects in the US). One could also argue that the cost of mass unemployment caused by government policies should be factored in as well (e.g. contrast Spain and Germany).
"Different lenses" is a cute term for cherry-picking. Using Sweden as an example is bad enough, since they're well known for having one of the most "social democratic" governments in the world. Using Greece is even worse, and I shouldn't even need to explain why. It's like using Iceland as the only data point in a discussion of bank regulation, or Ukraine in a discussion of nuclear safety. Also, the numbers for local government (including US states) are likely to be even worse for your point. I challenge you to show that the numbers measured across the whole world (not just OECD and certainly not just two outliers) have changed significantly.
It's probably quite reasonable to include pension costs. You also forgot to mention the salaries of government contractors (especially military). On the other hand, the numbers we have are already limited to people in the workforce so adjusting separately for unemployment would be double-counting. Nice try. When all reasonable adjustments are made, the results might show a slightly greater advantage for government workers, but still very far from your wild claims about government workers getting super-rich off the backs of the rest of us. Those remain utterly unfounded, and the burden is still on you to provide more than a few shreds of pseudo-evidence.
Government employees make a lot in absolute terms, but are also much more likely to be highly educated or skilled. In practice, white collar professionals take a pay cut to work in government.
Evidence?