CAMPAIGN COUNTDOWN: STIMULATING GOVERNMENT

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/3542/26/

Steyn on America
Tuesday, 26 October 2010

All this week at SteynOnline, we're looking at what I regard as the key issues in this year's big vote. I'd love to hear your thoughts, so drop us a line at Mark's Mailbox. Following yesterday's musings on money, today we're looking at the new class divide: Government vs the private sector.

The other day The Washington Post previewed one aspect of this Saturday’s Jon Stewart rally – a march by government workers:

   Organizers of the ‘Government Doesn't Suck March’ (their choice of words, not ours) were inspired in part by last week's Washington Post poll that revealed widespread negative perceptions of federal workers.

   ‘We hear it day in and day out: the government sucks, federal employees are lazy and their positions are redundant,’ said march organizer Steve Ressler, founder of GovLoop, a social networking Web site for public servants.

   ‘It's time to turn the tables and remind the world that government employees just happen to be people -- people that don't suck,’ Ressler said in a message sent to The Federal Eye on Sunday announcing the march. Government workers ‘are a lot of cool cats’ who work hard, listen to good music and watch Stewart's ‘The Daily Show,’ ‘but that's all after they've spent a whole day keeping the country running,’ he said.

Actually, government does suck. It sucks too much money out of my pocket and gives it to Steve Ressler and his fellow “cool cats”. And they’re not running the country, but running it into the ground. In the 18 months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, over seven million Americans lost their jobs, yet the percentage of federal bureaucrats earning $100,000 or more went up from 14 per cent to 19 per cent: An economic downturn for you, but not for them. They’re upturn girls living in a downturn world. At the start of the “downturn” the Department of Transportation had just one employee earning more than $170,000 per year. Eighteen months later, it had 1,690. In the year after the passage of Obama’s “stimulus”, the private sector lost 2.5 million jobs, but the federal government gained 416,000 jobs. Even if one accepts the government’s ludicrous concept of “creating or saving” jobs, by its own figures four out of every five jobs “created or saved” were government jobs. “Stimulus” stimulates government, not the economy. It’s part of the remorseless governmentalization of American life.

When the subject of the leviathan comes up, the media and other statism groupies tend to say, “Oh, well, it’s easy to talk about cutting government spending, until you start looking at individual programs, most of which tend to be very popular.”

“Programs” is a sly word. Regardless of the merits of the “program”, it requires human beings to run it. And government humans cost more than private humans. In 2009, the average civilian employee of the United States government earned $81,258 in salary plus $41,791 in benefits. Total: $123,049.

By contrast, the average American employed in the private sector earned $50,462 in salary plus $10,589 in benefits. Total: $61,051.

So the federal worker earns more than twice as much as the private sector worker. “Experts” talk about the difficulty of restructuring entitlement programs, or of carving out a few billions in savings here and there. But here’s a thought experiment:

Imagine if federal workers made the same as the private workers who pay their salaries. Imagine if they had to get buy on 61K instead of 123 grand.

Meanwhile, in what’s left of the real world, as disastrous as the squandering of America’s money has been, the squandering of its human capital has been worse. Once upon a time, millions of Americans worked on farms. Then, as agriculture declined, they moved into the factories. When manufacturing was outsourced, they settled mostly into low-paying service jobs or better-paying cubicle jobs – so-called “professional services” often deriving from the ever swelling accounting and legal administration that now attends almost any activity in America. What comes next?

Or, more to the point, what if there is no “next”?

Jobs rarely “come back”. When they go, they go for good. Something else takes their place. After the recession of the early Nineties, America lost some three million jobs in manufacturing but gained a little under the same number in construction. Then the subprime hit the fan, and America now has more housing stock than it will need for a generation. So what replaces those three million lost construction jobs? What are all those carpenters, plasterers, excavators going to be doing? Not to mention the realtors, home-loan bankers, contract lawyers, rental-income accountants and other “professional service” cube people whose business also relies to one degree or another on a soaraway property market.

What if we’ve run out of “next”?

For the Obamatrons, government is what comes next. Government jobs, government “light rail” projects, government “green jobs” pork projects, government “WiFi-in-every-two-day-a-week-rural-library” makework schemes. Non-jobs for a Potemkin Main Street. The White House website is a positive cornucopia of fantasy employment, in which, day in, day out, President Obama and his sidekicks hymn the delights of such transformative innovations as “solar energy”. Does even the Obama cabinet seriously believe solar energy will create hundreds of thousands of real (ie, non-subsidized boondoggled) jobs? This is the official narrative of the Obama era, and there is nothing in it anywhere even to hint at the possibility of a growing economy holding its own against China, India and other rivals.

An America comprised of therapeutic statists, regulatory enforcers, multigenerational dependents, identity-group rent-seekers, undocumented laborers, stimulus grantwriting liaison coordinators, six-figure community organizers, millionaire diversity-outreach consultants, billionaire carbon-offset traders, a diversionary-leisure “knowledge sector”, John Edwards’ anti-poverty consultancy, John Kerry’s vintner, and Al Gore’s holistic masseuse will still offer many opportunities, but not for that outmoded American archetype, the self-reliant citizen seeking to nourish his family through the fruits of his labor. And nor for millions of others just struggling to stay afloat. A statist America won’t be a large Sweden – unimportant but prosperous – but something closer to the Third World, corrupt and chaotic, broke and brutish – for all but a privileged few.

The new class war in the western world is between “public servants” and the rest of us. In Washington, the marching bureaucrats are telling us government doesn’t suck. But in Greece, the bloated public service has sucked so much out of the economy there’s nothing left. To reprise my favorite Ronald Reagan line:

   We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around.

He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and it sums up his legacy abroad: Across post-Communist Europe, from Lithuania to Bulgaria to Slovenia, governments that had nations were replaced by nations that have governments.

Alas, in Reagan’s own country, we are atrophying into a government that has a nation. That’s what November 2nd is about.


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