Economic decline is a choice, not a fate

...and it has everything to do with big, intrusive government.  The story from Canada:

Cutting public sector pay -- relative to private sector -- is more than a fiscal necessity. It is also a moral necessity, though using that word more in the sense currently conveyed by the word "morale." With money, job security, and administrative power, comes prestige. We need to reduce that.

This is one of the points that was grasped in the earliest stages of turning India around, by such as the late Rajiv Gandhi. The argument was that business and all other private activity suffered, because the country's "best and brightest" were magnetically attracted to the prestige of so-called "public service." It was what upwardly mobile parents prepared their children for.