How Public Employees Become Rich

Through a convoluted system fire and police department administrators in California can reap pension payments that would dazzle an emperor while simultaneously bankrupting the communities that once employed them. This case seems particularly outrageous.

New Los Angeles police chief Michael Moore had retired from the department with a $1.27 million  going away present, was rehired weeks later to the same position and then given the chief's job in June. 

 
US police chiefs, like Michael Moore above, could easily be mistaken for North Korean generals or Soviet-era admirals. They certainly don't look like "public servants".

One of the biggest objections to the bygone Soviet system that the US spent billions of dollars to keep away was that government apparatchiks had access to things that ordinary citizens did not, including money. Even as the Russian experiment in socialism failed, their counterparts in the US are following the same path, siphoning immense sums from the private sector in exchange for non-productive activity. The US is rapidly approaching USSR 2.0.