> A bit tangential to what I was referring to, but essentially we can sum your points up to labor shortage, right?
In a sense, though there's also some intersecting concerns. E.g. judges and lawyers aren't economically productive in the "creating things that we can sell or export" sense. That presents an opportunity cost, because it means we are pulling people out of roles that are economically productive and into roles that are not.
E.g. the general cost of labor would probably rise if the judicial system started employing full percentage points of the US population more than they currently do. Likewise, I suspect GDP would drop since we are pulling people out of "making things" and into "regulating things". We would just be literally making fewer things, since we had fewer people employed "making things".
> Law school doesn't have to cost $250k. And pay doesn't have to be $30k at entry to a government job.
One of the issues here is that the government (state or federal) is both the prosecutor and the source of funding for the defendant's lawyer. E.g. here's a fun tidbit for California: a prosecutor's average salary range is $98k-$132k while a public defender's average salary range is $89k-$119k. Even among jobs working for the government, it's about a 10% pay cut to defend people instead of prosecuting them. Across the country there are roughly twice as many employed in prosecutorial roles as there are in defense roles (funding roughly matches that, with prosecutor's offices getting funded at ~180% the rate of public defenders). In 2018, there were 372 arrests per attorney in public defender's offices but only 260 per attorney in district attorney offices.
Prosecutors can afford to spend ~150% of the time on a case that public defenders can, and can afford to spend far more per case on expert opinions, lab results, etc.
The government wants it that way, because it feeds into the "efficiency". People are far more likely to take a plea deal when they know their public defender is overworked, underpaid, and under-resourced compared to the prosecutors. Funding defense attorneys makes cases take longer to get through court, because people would be more likely to reject plea deals and the public defenders would have more time to formulate legal arguments.
Anecdotally, you can see this first hand in video from court cases. It's not unusual for there to be 3 attorneys sitting behind the prosecutor's table, and a single attorney behind the defendant's. The prosecutors are just that much more well-resourced; they can afford to send a trio of attorneys to double-check each other. Meanwhile the public defenders are scrambling with stacks of folders trying to figure out which one is for their next defendant.