Tony Rand rolled out a sure-fire crowd-pleaser last week: limit the number of days legislators can collect their expenses.

Voters love it. Good-government types extol it. Legislators can hardly vote against it.

But some people question – privately – the wisdom behind it.

Are shorter legislative sessions by definition better? In whatever your line of work, is your product or service better the less time you spend on it?

Is keeping legislative pay down really the same as better government? Or does it result, as one legislator said privately, in bodies that are primarily the reserve of the rich and the retired?

We effectively have a full-time legislature, this member said. We just don’t pay people enough to do the job full-time.

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