printGOVERNMENT IS. “The government will have to hire some 600,000 people during the four years of President Obama’s term. That would bump up the current workforce by a third,” reports MSNBC.
The New York Times informs that, “While the private sector has shed 6.9 million jobs since the beginning of the recession, state and local governments have expanded their payrolls and added 110,000 jobs, according to a report issued Thursday by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.”
It then adds a stupendously silly afterthought:
“Government jobs are always more stable than private sector jobs during downturns, but their ability to weather the current deep recession startled Donald J. Boyd, the senior fellow at the institute who wrote the report.”
[SNIP]
Government jobs come into being by political fiat, not by market forces or necessity. Political will is what sustains them; it is state force that accounts for their stability and longevity. This is why these jobs, so to speak, “write” their own conditions of employment.
Government jobs have another signal characteristic:
“Government job creation schemes are predicated on government taxing, borrowing or inflating the money supply—activities that reduce capital available to the private sector. Such programs are politically popular because they are visible. However, for every job ‘created’ by government, an unidentifiable job will be destroyed in the private sector.”
It’s a zero-sum game: The parasite is sucking the lifeblood of the host. The larger he gets, the weaker the host grows.
The growth of government, of course, means that many more leaches will be implementing onerous rules and regulations that make it even harder for the struggling private economy to recover.
Still, the Times is perplexed at “the disparity between the public and private sector job market.”
Update I: “CANADA’S private sector added 49,200 workers in August, the first time they have hired more than fired since September,” reports the AP.
Of greater interest is the fact that, “while the U.S. has seen 81 banks fail in 2009 alone, Canada has not experienced the failure of any major financial institution. There has been no crippling mortgage meltdown or banking crisis north of the border, where the financial sector is dominated by five large banks.”
Update II (Sept. 5): MILTON FRIEDMAN (Via Roy B.) on the fallacy of government as an agent of wealth creation and on needing production—goods and services—not spending:
Update III (Sept. Eighth): SWITZERLAND HAS “knocked the United States off the position as the world’s most competitive economy” (via Reuters & Drudge).
The U.S. as the world’s largest economy lost last year’s strong lead, slipping to number two for the first time since the introduction of the index in its current form in 2004.
The study also factors in a survey among business leaders, assessing for example the government’s efficiency or the flexibility of the labor market. …
The WEF applauded Switzerland for its capacity to innovate, sophisticated business culture, effective public services, excellent infrastructure and well-functioning goods markets.
If to go by the report, the depression is some kind of swine flu, which randomly infects some, but not other, banks. However, American banks were leveraged like no other financial institutions in the world. (I’m not including Zimbabwe’s banks, although maybe I should, given how close the US is to Tanzania with respect to the soundness of its banks: “In the assessment of banks’ soundness, the Alpine country still ranked 44th. U.S. banks fell to 108 — right behind Tanzania — and British banks to 126 in the ranking, now topped by Canada’s banks.”)
US banks were also uniquely subject to state-mandated affirmative-action lending: a “State-mandated spoils system for minorities.”
Wait until the insurance industry collapses because of an Obama decree against “discrimination” based on health status. This is the very definition of insurance. Remove the costs of risk taking and you remove the incentives to avoid risks. Doesn’t Dipstick associate this incentive structure with his oft-repeated objective: inculcating healthy habits in the population? Moreover, unless the industry can charge premiums based on risk, it becomes a non-profit. Remove profit from the insurance equation, and the industry will be on its way to croaking.
The day the NYT goes belly up will be a very good day indeed – provided they don’t get bailed out by our Dear Leader, Obama the Magnificent (genuflect now)! One would be hard-pressed to identify an institution more malevolent, mendacious and immoral than the odious “Newspaper of record.” Its demise cannot come soon enough.
Actually, if the money that is employing person X comes from taxing (robbing) person Y, it is defacto a “government job” even if X is nominally employed by SAIC, Blackwater, Lockheed Martin, or General Motors. If anything, the statistics UNDERestimate the degree of parastism in the economy.
It’s not really a zero-sum game.
It’s less than zero.
I learned this long ago as a native of Washington, D.C.
The Department of Education, for example, educates no one, yet does much, much harm to this country.
A zero-sum game would be to pay government workers to stay home and not meddle. There would be a financial cost, but no loss of individual liberties.
“The growth of government, of course, means that many more leaches will be implementing onerous rules and regulations that make it even harder for the struggling private economy to recover.” Ilana
Dear Government Leeches,
Be wise. A successful parasite does not kill its host! Be content to merely loot and leave the wealth generators alone.
I’ll desist after this:
Government: That place where busybodies can do their thing and get paid for it.
(busybody: A person who meddles or pries into the affairs of others. from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/busybody)
OK, I lied.
Roger,
Brilliant comment. Next time I’ll read all the comments before I post (well, at least yours).
Myron, I agree with your reasoning about the tax base for government jobs, even those jobs held by employees of the contracting firms you mention. I’d like to add, though, that an employee of a government contractor does not in any way have a “secure” position similar to that of a government employee. In fact, their positions are based on continued contracts according to the will of government officials, and they can be easily laid off in droves, basically overnight (which happened at the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.)
If the Obama Administration is creating hundreds of thousands of new government positions, they are essentially providing an opportunity for the same number of martinets to be in authority over non-government employees who may eventually have to turn cartwheels to continue to receive work. There is no good reason to do this.
Dear M. B. Moon –
Government employees have ample incentive to grow like a cancer. Work alone and you might be a GS-12. Supervise a few and you are a GS-13. Supervise 25 and you might be a GS-14. – you get the drift.
Cut the budget!!! — What fun is there in that – that will only get you an unsatisfactory. I’ve ticked off many people when I told them that their harebrained schemes won’t work – they never want to hear it – rather they want even more money to throw down their ratholes. As one Air Force Col. said to me when I said in 1988 how ludicrous it was to do “detailed engineering drawings” of Soviet systems for year 2050 (I even said “how do you even know there will be a Soviet Union in 2050”) “SHUT UP!”
Myron,
I know you work for the government and I don’t consider you a leech. Consider: If the Government employed 100% of US what shame would there be in being a government worker? How much of the private sector has been crowded out by government? One has to eat. I appreciate that you feel you may bite the hand that feeds you since it stole from you in the first place!
[Also, b/c of various state monopolies and corruptions, individuals with certain qualifications and skills often cannot get work in the private sector.]
Milton Friedman has a compelling theory on government jobs
The Most Persistent Economic Fallacy of All Time!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrg1CArkuNc&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fmjperry.blogspot.com%2F&feature=player_embedded
Too bad no one mentioned C. Northcote Parkinson author of Parkinson’s Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law
And here’s yet another reason why Uncle Sam’s payroll is bloating up like Ted Kennedy on ‘roids. http://lashawnbarber.com/archives/2004/07/30/blacks-overrepresented-in-federal-government/
It’s a virtuous circle: More government workers equal more Obama voters equal more government workers. And so on ad infinitum.
I should call it Chaillet’s Corollary.