You’d have a massive influx of incompetent grifters who only get themselves elected for the salary. At the end of the day public service still has to a “sacrifice” (doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be compensated at e.g. top 5 percentile income).

The Singapore experience is very different.

They probably do more than just pay a lot though.

Singapore is a city state and a semi-dictatorship. I don’t feel any of their policies are that generalizable to most other places