Bigger government means more government employees. Those employees then become a permanent lobby for continual government growth. The nation may have reached critical mass; the number of government employees at every level may have gotten so high that it is politically impossible to roll back the bureaucracy, rein in the costs, and restore lost freedoms.Read the whole thing. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 15, 2010 09:30 AM | Email This
...
The predictable results: Higher taxes, eroded public services, unsustainable levels of debt, and massive roadblocks to reforming even the poorest performing agencies and school systems. If this system is left to grow unchecked, we will end up with a pale imitation of the free society envisioned by the Founders.
The more people work for government at all levels, the more we tend to lose whatever competitive advantages we still have compared to the rest of the world. It may vary somewhat by agency, location, and profession; but in large part Government employees become more-or-less insulated from one of the core principals that makes capitalism work; i.e.:
There are signficant rewards for success; and penalties for failure. When performance becomes largely irrelevant to keeping your job (except perhaps for the most egregious cases); and especially if the worse an agency performs they just end up getting more funding; then the whole bureaucratic government structure tends to drift inexorably down to a lowest common denominator.
If this trend is not significantly reversed (let alone allowed to continue in this direction), China, India, and a number of other countries are going to eat our lunch (a friend recently made the comment that the way it's going now, they are going to have us for dessert real soon).
SIDEBAR suggested reading:
Edward Gibbon's classic 18th-century historical work: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Hopefully this country will wake up before we become another textbook case of how another great nation let itself slowly fade away.
Sane liberals, the ones who have a conscience or a sliver of responsibility, realize the paths their marxist nutroot base insist on following will destroy our economy and our high standard of living for our children and grandchildren.
They see the writing on the wall and know that when the next major terrorst attack comes, their policy of restoring a pre-9/11 mentality/ approach to the war on islamic jihadism, mirandizing enemy combatants, and treating those who attempt mass murder via terrorism the same as we would treat a convenience store robbery suspect will come back to haunt their leftist, anti-american, obama leg-humping, enviro fanatic selves.
They spend years trying to convince the American people that they are not liberals. Thanks to president teleprompter we are all being treated to a refresher course on what liberalism means.
Rather than government employees, we should force the state to distribute any work it needs to get done to the private sector. The way we renew our license tabs is a great example of how this can be done.
If we do so, we will have thousands of people competing with each other for government contracts, none of which will have enough power to dictate politics. If any one group or company does grow powerful, their greed will leave room for a new competitor in the market.
In the state government, there will only be a few bureaucrats whose job it is to create, distribute, and validate contracts. These will be little more than legislative paiges, who can do nothing more than answer to the legislature and governor for their behavior and without any long-term job security.
Posted by: Jonathan Gardner on February 15, 2010 01:05 PMLike red lights cams and parking meter fees, its not about safety or service anymore, it's about "new sources of revenue" to pay for the Hydra of Government.
People in public service should be ashamed of themselves. They have bloated our bureaucracy, created massive deficits and debt that we won't recover from, and generated unsustainable lifestyles and expectations of pensions and other perks that go far beyond what any reasonable privately employed citizen could expect. But shame is not in the DNA of a person that will accept a $100k per year job without near the expectation of education or experience credentials of a similar paying job in the private sector.
The meltdown is looming. And eventually many of these people are going to find themselves unemployed and not sought after by private employers that will know they have grown to use to exorbitant benefits, a lack of merit to determine whether they should stay employed, and often a lazy and unproductive attitude.
Posted by: Jeff B. on February 15, 2010 01:31 PMI did get a break, but less than half the drop in home value. My 12.6% drop in home value will get me a 6% drop in my property taxes this year.
Just another example of how government can do whatever the hell it wants to as long as half the voters don't have a stake in the consequences of the votes they cast. And as the left works to register more and more people in that category, the vote of the working class of Americans gets more and more watered down.
Posted by: Reality on February 15, 2010 01:52 PMBut no, Democrats are so drunk with power, that they are willing to risk their agenda and the entire economy to stay in bed with unions for the votes. See Obama and Stern. That's not going to last long, which is why I always say that all we have to do is hand out rope to these Progressives. Overreach is in their DNA. They will hang themselves deliberately or accidentally by playing low oxygen sex games that they learned from reading The Stranger.
Posted by: Jeff B. on February 15, 2010 02:33 PMThe New Math: Union Pensionomics Levies Crushing Debt on State and Local Governments
Posted by: Jeff B. on February 15, 2010 02:39 PMThe UW had a 33% increase in applications for its graduate program in public administration. The kids are no dummies, socialized education notwithstanding.
What this means inevitably is that the most talented and brightest students will go into government rather than become entrepeneurs and inventors.
Posted by: travis t on February 16, 2010 01:07 AMMen naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter -- by peaceful or revolutionary means -- into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.Woe to the nation when this latter purpose prevails among the mass victims of lawful plunder when they, in turn, seize the power to make laws! ...
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
When these "off-budget" jobs created by contracts and grants jobs are added to the "onbudget" headcount composed of civil service, uniformed military personnel, and postal service jobs, the "true size" of the federal workforce stood at 12.1 million in October, 2002 up from 11 million in October 1999. Although some of the post-1999 growth occurred in the final year of the Clinton administration, most of the 1.1 million new on- and off-budget jobs appear to reflect increased spending since the Bush Administration entered office.
And yet GWB was re-nominated and re-elected in 2004 with a re-elected Republican majority Congress and neither Reason nor any other so-called conservative bloggers thought increasing government headcount by greater than 10% in less than 4 years was such a big deal.
Funny.
Posted by: MikeBoyScout on February 16, 2010 06:40 PMSo I assume you're upset with the growth of the size of Government?
Posted by: Shanghai Dan on February 16, 2010 07:12 PMNo I am not.
The size and cost of any government, service or good is only relevant as it relates to the total cost and benefit equation.
The size of the government shrank in the 90s while our benefits increased.
The size of the government increased significantly in following decade and we failed to win and exit two wars, allowed the banksters to practically destroy the global financial system and wound up in the worst job destroying recession since record keeping began in the 1940s.
The article in Reason attempts to create the notion of some magical government free society in the minds of the Founders. The Founders created the Federal government and its republican representative democracy. The federal government was exponentially larger in 1800 than it was in 1790.
At the present moment our nation does not have a deficit crisis, but a jobs crisis.
If one is interested in spending borrowed dollars (yuan!!) more wisely and more prudently, then stop complaining about arbitrary size and start acting to stop the useless and extremely expensive occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Posted by: MikeBoyScout on February 16, 2010 08:08 PM
Civil servant employment fell, according to your link. Contract employment increased. If the benefit is there, that is the way to get it; contractors can be released a LOT easier than civil servants, and they do not incur the ever-increasing benefits packages we find in direct Government employment.
Basically, you get more bang for your buck with contractors than you do with direct civil servant employees.
As far as the wars, I thought you guys said Afghanistan was the good war, Iraq the bad one? Iraq's been won; you can than Bush for that. Afghanistan is getting worse under Obama's watch, and he's committing more resources and troops to it. So I take it you're pretty upset with the President and his handling of Afghanistan?
Posted by: Shanghai Dan on February 16, 2010 09:27 PMOften liberals simply don't understand conservative arguments. I see this all the time.
But there's one liberal point that many conservatives like Atilla don't seem to understand: The reason for treating terrorists like criminals goes well beyond any case that's at hand. After all, this terrorist is already in custody. The people we want to influence are the hundreds, thousands or even millions of young males around the globe who are contemplating or actively struggling with themselves over the question of whether to become anti-Western terrorists. Think of the effect on their thinking when they hear that we had someone in our custody from their country or religion and "accidentally" tortured them to death, like happened in Kabul for example.
George Washington understood this point and captured British soldiers were so shocked at how well they were treated, they were able be told where to travel to turn themselves in to be incarcerated by the Continentals.
And btw,thanks, Mike BS
Best, new left conservative
The enemy your fighting today is always meaner than the one you fought yesterday and whose accent you now find charming.
Don't you notice there are hundreds of millions of Moslems over there that go about their day-to-day lives without ever joining Al Queda? Most of these folks seriously dislike US mideast policy but they hold more sophisticated opinions about the world and the use of violence than Osama Bin Laden. And they pay attention to the way Moslems get treated in this country.
The most brutal side doesn't always win, long term, a point that paleo-conservatives sometimes fail to understand.
new left conservative
Posted by: new left conservative on February 17, 2010 10:10 AM"On the stimulus's first anniversary, keep in mind one number: 6.3 million.
That is the Obama jobs gap -- the difference between the 3.3 million net jobs President Obama said would be created (not just saved) and the 3 million additional net jobs that have since been lost.
By the president's own logic, the stimulus failed. So Obama has shifted his argument. Sure, the economy lost jobs, he now says, but without the stimulus it would have lost nearly 2 million more jobs.
This "it would have been worse" theory is completely unprovable. No one knows how the economy would have performed without the stimulus.
Furthermore, it's faith-based economics. The White House's new estimates of "saving" nearly 2 million jobs are not based on observations of the economy's recent performance. Rather, they are based on the Obama administration's unshakable belief that deficit spending must create jobs and growth. Specifically, the White House's "proof" that the stimulus created jobs is an economic model that they programmed to assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs.
How's that for circular logic?
The idea that government spending creates jobs makes sense only if you never ask where the government got the money."
This falls right in with the road to serfdom. The real war is the middle class vs. the Federal Government - who are robbing from the middle class to give to the rich corporations, not the taking from the rich to give to the poor.
Posted by: KDS on February 17, 2010 10:00 PM