Perhaps the top talent isn't in the government, but would you be supportive of increasing pay for government jobs in order to draw top talent away from the private sector?
Surely you jest. The only thing you can have a 100% certainity that politicians will agree on is on raising their own salaries and retirement funds.
Governmental pay is generally comical when compared with private equivalents, this is why when faced with talented regulators auditing their corporation, the corporation will simply offer to hire them.
If you were to compare their pay to general unskilled labor, then yes they are being paid well. But it would be a shit-show if you replaced them with general unskilled labor.
One thing many people don't realize is that elected officials aren't the ones writing legislation, because if they did it would get completely torn apart by skilled lawyers. Legislatures have their own in-house lawyers that draft legislation for them. This is why i'm more of a good-government advocate rather than a destroy-government advocate. The weaker a government is, the easier it is for it to be corrupted, infiltrated, manipulated, and misused.
I would challenge any of you guys complaining about government ineptitude to go to a legislative session, go to committee executive sessions and hearings, budget deliberations, etc. and actually see what is going on. Too often people just talk knowledgeably about a topic based on how they've heard someone else describe it. This is the best way to be misled. First hand observation will allow you to arrive at your own conclusions.