MIDDLE ISRAEL: Don't tell Babe Ruth By Amotz Asa-El (February 24) With all other Depression-era arguments failing to convince Babe Ruth to take a cut in his $80,000-a-year salary, and with a New York Yankees executive telling him that even President Herbert Hoover was earning less than him, the baseball legend retorted: "Yeah, but I had a better year." Fortunately for the Yankees, Ruth didn't live to use as his parameter the thousands of Israeli bureaucrats who starred in this week's annual report of public-sector pay excesses; boy, did they each have a year: In the Israel Electric Corporation, the monthly wages of 191 senior executives cost NIS 45,144 each; a deputy director-general and a crane operator skimmed NIS 66,357 and NIS 44,207 respectively, while the rest of the monopoly's 13,880 employees, 1,800 of whom have company cars, averaged NIS 17,576. In the Israel Broadcast Authority, the wage of the deputy-director of the video department has cost his employer - that's the Israeli taxpayer - NIS 46,364 per month. In the Clalit Health Services, 29 senior executives' salaries cost an average NIS 54,923. In the Ports and Railways Authority, 192 dudes' wages cost us a monthly NIS 43,366. The Oil Refineries' 1,134 workers cost an average NIS 15,439 in wages last year, while El Al's 5,393 employees' salaries cost on average NIS 18,103. This fiscal orgy is no longer a collection of anecdotes; it adds up to a celebration of managerial inefficiency, taxpayer abuse and national strangulation, and sheds light on the Third World heart of our economy's high-tech soul. In sheer numbers, the deformity is of immense proportions, since it translates to an overall NIS 2 billion in public-sector salary excesses last year alone, according to the Treasury's labor relations czar, Yuval Rachlevsky. Yet things become even worse when examined on the structural level, since the excesses are only in relation to regulations, which in turn are determined by Treasury bureaucrats rather than by market forces. In other words, had the Israel Electric Corporation been exposed to competition from other power generators, not only would its salaries have been considerably lower, but its gigantic workforce would also have shrunk dramatically. Moreover, due to its current monopolistic structure, the IEC also enjoys assorted tax breaks which are difficult to monitor. That, too, is a form of corporate welfare that comes at the public's expense, for the simple reason that every shekel the government fails to demand from big business, it ends up squeezing out of Mr. and Mrs. Israeli. And that is also why, even after the defense budget's relative shrinkage over the past 15 years, we have remained among the developed world's five most heavily taxed societies. Yet most gravely, the public-sector leadership's systematic plundering of the private sector and the middle class weighs on the government's ability to launch the kinds of ambitious infrastructure projects which are indispensable for our economic growth. This week, for instance, Teheran inaugurated its first subway line. The question obviously arises: If the Iranians can do it, why can't we? One of the many reasons for this disgrace is that at least some of the many billions such a project would cost end up in the pockets of a few thousand people who violate regulations from within and fend off competition from without. And so the question ceases to be why all this is bad for us and becomes why we deserve this, and how, if at all, this robbery of the national coffers can ever end. To fully fathom this gang rape, one must take note of the bustling traffic between the political system and the public sector. If a guy like former deputy defense minister Ovadia Eli can end up chairing the Oil Refineries, why would he have initially - when empowered to do so - supported this company's long-overdue sell off? If former Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Haggai Merom is now about to get the Ports Authority's chairmanship, then the knowledge that he might some day benefit from the existence of such perks probably prevented him in the past from eliminating thoem. And if former transport minister Yitzhak Levy could hand out the Airports Authority to loyalist Avi Kostelitz, then why would he support that entity's detachment from the taxpayer's umbilical chord? Clearly, the only way this calamity will ever be effectively fought is to have a leadership whose agenda is dominated by domestic issues, and who see in public office a duty to serve the public rather than an opportunity to fill their pockets. In fact, this kind of change could have happened last year, had Ehud Barak assembled in his coalition Likud, Meretz, Shinui and Yisrael Ba'aliya alongside his own One Israel. Such a grouping, though unable to agree on hardly any foreign- or defense-related issue, would nonetheless have found ample common ground on matters of civic cleansing. Surely, for these to top his agenda, in line with the spirit of his election campaign, Barak must be as passionate about public-sector pay, mass transit, health care, and a host of other domestic concerns as he is about maps, binoculars and battle dress. But then again, had he been such, he would not have been Ehud Barak.