printThe Free Dictionary teaches that a host is “an animal or plant on which or in which another organism lives.” This is precisely the nature of the relationship between the private, productive sector, and the public, unproductive sector. The last lives at the pleasure of the first; or lives off the first.
In the brouhaha over Barack Obama’s “The Private Sector is Doing Fine” comment, nobody is asking, Who’s property is it anyway? And why would a system (“The Economy”) do better when the number of parasites (people whose spending is financed as a result of coercive transfers of wealth from the private sector) it carries continues to grow (or to stagnate)?
The public sector consumes wealth—it doesn’t produce it.
Reason Magazine, representing as it does a variant of what I call “Libertarianism Lite,” focuses elsewhere.
Based on charts he generated at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ website, Reason’s Nick Gillespie notes that, “As it stands, the number of private-sector employees is about equal to what it was in 2005. And in 2000, which is really appalling. … The current number of government workers is about what it was in 2006.”
In the rest of the post, Gillespie does his utmost to clarify what BHO really meant when he said that,
The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.
As soon as you hear the words “private SECTOR” – and so-called conservatives use it as often as libs – you know the whole system has passed the Socialist tipping point: 6 wolves and 5 sheep arguing about what’s for dinner, then it’s 6/4 (Greece, right now), 6/3….6/0…and then the socialist wolves eat each other. At least in theory. In fact, due to all the debt-finance and monetization along the way, the currency will collapse well before
this automatic end point. In the case of the U.S., that’ll be real soon.
The parasite/host dynamic is instructive but too little descriptive.
The most seamlessly corrupt public sector in the Union: Chicago/Cook County, both with their hands in the pants of the state (Springfield) legislature and all three having their mandibles in the flesh of the producers. Here you have the apt metaphor – zombies: a mindless soulless citizenry that couldn’t vote for other than a flesh-eating mutation of themselves if their lives depended on it.
The more we have working for government the more votes thare are going to be voting for government. Therefore government workers, along with the millions who are fed and housed by the government and/or don’t pay taxes give us a massive underculture designed to keep government all powerful. So, it will take more and more taxes from fewer and fewer people in an ever shrinking private sector to keep the parasite class fed. No way out of theis vicious circle without strong, charismatic leadership and I don’t see that on any horizon.