"Like, the same font, right? And she points this out to the HR manager, and they’re like, Yeah, that means that this person’s the most qualified, because it’s the exact same language. And she’s like, This person is clearly unqualified because they didn’t even know to reformat. And this is not an outlier. Like, this happens a lot.

So first they’re looking for these exact matches. And then they take everybody who was really close in language—and also, by the way, who has something called a government resume, which is different from a private-sector resume, and you have to know that somehow, magically, before you apply. Then from that pool, they send everyone a self-assessment questionnaire, and everybody who marks themselves as master, and I literally mean master—I think that’s the top rating in a lot of these—they make the next down select, so they move on to the next pool."

This is not necessarily what I would consider transparent or fair. FWIW I do think government can provide value, but I think folks who don't live in America don't understand how dramatically different and worse the implementation of government is in America from many other countries who sometimes do get value from some aspects of government even if the goals are similar.

Health care in the US is definitely stupid and bad and can easily be made better than it is, but all the easy sounding obvious right answers that would fix everything about some aspect of life usually don't pan out in practice.

What is "good" communication depends on the social context of the communication, the audience, etc. A novel probably shouldn't be written in the same style as a project status update document. IMO one of the downsides of people in our modern education system being drilled on the "one true way" of communicating for a small handful of contexts (position paper essays, tactical business memos) is that they begin to think that is the only way to communicate ever in any context to any audience and forget that different people have different tastes and in a lot of contexts catering to your audience's taste is what matters.

For companies that are publicly traded, if you were to wipe out the shareholders, that would disproportionately hurt financial institutions that pick and choose stocks and concentrate their holdings and exert influence on the corporate policy over passive investments from the average Joe's retirement fund. To the extent that it's "just a tax", it's a tax that's progressively higher on the people more likely to be at fault.

"I'm not the King of Hiring" is fair though, if you're in a jurisdiction where there is no transparency law and you're not setting policy for your company, you may well be required not to provide this information publicly and that's just how it is.

The fact that there exist some types of private information for which we recognize a right to maintain privacy does not at all imply it is morally wrong for the government to recognize a public right for some other type of information (salary ranges). In the US there exist both the Freedom of Information Act and the Fourth Amendment guarding against warrantless search. It's obviously clear that the government recognizes the right to demand public transparency for some types of information and the right to protect privacy for other information. You've made no attempt whatsoever to explain why this type of information should fall in one category or the other, just gestured to the existence of one of the categories and implied that this proves that the information in question belongs there.