This from Power Line
Government workers are everywhere proliferating, even as private sector employment flags. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore notes this astonishing fact:
Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.
It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined.
To borrow an analogy from biology, if the parasites overwhelm the host, it is catastrophic for both the host and the parasites. (Which is why viruses aren’t really trying to kill you, at least not quickly.) That analogy may be unfair; certainly not all government workers are parasites. Let’s try this one: if the cowboy gets bigger than the horse, both the horse and the cowboy are in trouble.
There are many reasons for pessimism these days, but first on the list is the prospect that the growth of the public sector at the expense of the private may have become irreversible.
The analogy of government as rider on the private citizen is too true. And as one of the founding fathers pointed out, none of us was born fitted out with stirrups, nor were any of us obviously designed to be ridden.
April 2nd, 2011 8:59 pm
Well phil, as long as you let me ride ya till I retire at 55 you will get no complaints out of this cowboy. Keeping it real though, it’s the public that ultimately determines what services are provided. They want more services and there will be more workers to do it. To get away from that a culture of telling people no from time to time will have to develop.
In the mean time, as long as the public doesn’t want to be beaten or robbed by criminals the prisons will stay open. I guess that’s good news for this cowboy anyways.
April 3rd, 2011 7:06 am
The only hope is that many of the government workers are conservative and recognize the problem too. Many of us vote consistently against what would appear to be our own best interest, i.e. raising taxes to pay for our salaries.
April 3rd, 2011 8:50 am
Obviously, many government employees do necessary things, provide services, etc. As the blog post I quoted said, not all government employees are “parasites.” Prisons are an obvious function of government (we wouldn’t want private parties to be allowed to decide who goes to jail, although a privately provided “prison service” seems to work in some places). Some services are possibly the reasonable role of government, but generally things the government wasn’t doing in 1880 are mostly things it shouldn’t be doing now, with only a few minor exceptions (and those exceptions do not require a gigantic workforce of government employees, since they can be accomplished by government hiring private parties to do most of the work, perhaps with a competitive bidding process, etc.).
Still: the parasites are those whose primary function has become more and more to CONTROL, not to directly SERVE. And the obvious government pattern is to start out serving, with high-sounding rhetoric (sometimes very well intended) but to end up controlling. That has been the pattern with everything from retirement systems, to medical services, to education, to product regulation, blah endless blah.
Most of what government regulates with the fig-leaf of the “interstate commerce clause” is highly parasitical. We didn’t need a Department of Education in 1950, and we don’t need one now. We would not be hip deep in toxic chemicals nor choking on the air if there was no EPA, or if the EPA had a tenth of its current reach and budget.
Here is all you really need to know about how even state and local government have become insane.
http://tinyurl.com/6n2oox
http://tinyurl.com/dhmmx4
not to mention
http://tinyurl.com/3z49nw9
The relevant quote:
When you read the whole story at the link above, and understand the situation, you’ll get the idea. Government parasites begin lots of phrases with “We have a regulation that…”, and then they often blather on about “safety” and finally “the children.”
Funny, sort of: it was those “land use” people at the county who forced me to waste years and tens of thousands of dollars to draw a line on a map. What would happen if that office just closed its doors for a year? Not too much.
The government did finally relent, to a degree: http://tinyurl.com/3u9twwr
But what are all of use supposed to do who can’t get media exposure and public embarrassment on our side to motivate county employees to see reason?
The answer is simple: pay up AND shut up.
April 4th, 2011 5:52 am
As far as private prisons go, from what I have heard they do slot of good. They only take minimum level offenders, mostly those waiting to be deported. It frees up state dollars for higher acuity customers. I have heard though that the guards at the private prisons only make 12 an hour or so, and often sell contraband to make up the difference. That may not be true, but the do refuse to handle riots and the like, staff from state prisons nearby have to come in and clean up. Which is fine, but shows you get what you pay for.