A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Why don’t we just all work for the government?

Why? Well, off the top of my head, perhaps because it is economically unsustainable?

Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine has assembled three pithy, straightforward answers to the question I've posed in the title of this blog-post.

1. They cost too much. As USA Today recently noted, federal employees make on average almost $8,000 more than their private-sector counterparts. When you add in benefits, the gap spreads to about $30,000. State and local government workers make around the same as private-sector counterparts, but their health and retirement packages mean they make significantly more in the end.

2. We can't fire them. The private sector has shed positions in response to slackening demand and the economic downturn. That sort of adjustment is painful but necessary, as it allows the economy to adjust to changing circumstances and workers and employers to move into new activities. Because it is guaranteed certain amounts of tax revenue and has a non-market mind-set, the public sector is largely insulated from such forces and keeps or even adds workers despite changed conditions. The result? We keep paying for things that we don't use, need, or want.

3. They create a permanent lobby for expanded government and higher taxes. Look at California, where teacher unions have spent over $211 million dollars on elections in the past decade. One result is that 40 percent of California's budget must be spent on education, regardless of the number and needs of students. Over the last 10 years, taxpayer contributions to public-sector pension funds has increased by 2000 percent! Such sort of tax-based gladhanding is just getting started. For the first time in history, the number of public-sector union employees is greater than those in the private sector, so expect to see even more lobbying for the sorts of mandatory raises and permanent job security that most of us can only dream of.

Here's a companion video that Reason.com produced for this topic:

The point here is NOT that public sector workers are "bad" or totally unnecessary.  We love and support and probably personally know people in our lives who work for the government in some capacity.  But the issue is larger and more important than that.  For me, it comes down to this: someone who gets their paycheck from the government vote for the people who can give them a raise, cut their salary, grown their department, or slash it all together.  It is a conflict of interest that involves billions of other peoples' tax dollars and the decisions made by leaders of a nation of 300 million people.

It would be like baseball changing their rules so that players were the ones who voted for which umpires would oversee their games each day.  Or an even more accurate analogy would be the players being able to vote for who would own their team each season.