Constitutional Libertarianism

Constitutional Libertarianism

Friday, February 18, 2011

The Government and Jobs

It's almost incredulous to see the news reports about politicians trying to make cuts to state and federal budgets and unions and others complaining about jobs being cut as a result.

It's a situation that was created by an over-ambitious government to begin with many years ago.  What's worse is that had they followed practical advice given to them prior to enlarging government hiring, they wouldn't have the troubles they are having now.

The governments job is to make sure things happen.  To make sure things, rights, freedoms, laws are adhered to, enforced, etc...

It is not the governments job to "do" those jobs related to those duties though, only to see that they happen.

Instead of taking jobs away from the public sector, where they belong, the government starting hiring extra people to do those jobs itself.

When the government should have been contracting with private business to get things done, they instead made those jobs government jobs.  Why, because it gives them more control over the details.

The nasty secret that's not a secret here is that government has an annoying tendency to become a micro-manager.

Employees of private businesses have a better chance of keeping their jobs when government has to pare down it's budget because the workload that was contracted by the government could potentially be replaced by new or increased contracts with other clients.

With the government being the employer, it just leads to guaranteed job losses.

Which, by the way, will add to the un-employment numbers.

In a socialist/communist country, even an imperialistic or monarchy government, government employment and micro-management is a better fit.  Maybe not more successful, but at least micro-management fits the model.

The U.S. is a democratic republic.    It is probably the farthest thing from "needing" governmental micro-management as you can get.

Our government is supposed to be one that is "by the people, of the people, for the people.  The argument that the bureaucracy of the government and being an employee of the government fits that is ludicrous. "The people" are the private citizens living in this country, not the people that are elected to represent us and their employees.  This is particularly relevant to the "by the people" portion of that ideology.

The government, federal, state and local, should be contracting every job and task it can to private businesses.  Yes, there are some tasks, especially where security, law enforcement and sensitive information are concerned that should be done by government depts.  Those should be the relative minority though.

Our governments and politicians made this bed many years ago when they decided they wanted to "do" things for the people instead of only making sure that things were being done.  Now it faces the reality of admitting they bit off more than they can chew and instead of making things better over time, they have gotten worse.

In terms of Republican or Democrat agendas and positions, as far as I am concerned they are both equally repugnant and exist only to serve their own agendas as opposed to meeting the needs of ALL Americans.  They are ridiculous, petty and self-serving.  Both parties have used the government and it's agencies which employ to further their own power grubbing agendas and have only made things the way they  are.  Worse.

There was a time when politicians were seen as "statesmen" which meant they could be counted on as generally being trustworthy and would not succumb to being bought out or using their positions to blatantly further their personal agendas.  Their dedication to the country as a whole exceeded their personal ambitions.

We are sorely lacking those kinds of people in government today.

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