The public-sector is NECESSARY, but must also NECESSARILY
be limited...very limited.
Public-sector positions (teachers, firefighters,
police, etc.) are paid for by the productivity and profitability of the
private-sector.
To date, no country has been able to sustain a
strong public-sector without a vibrant private-sector. The poorer a nation is
the smaller and less compensated is its public-sector. No government has been
able to figure out how to produce food, clothing, cars, computers, housing,
etc. outside the private sector.
Venezuela took over that nation’s once private and
very profitable oil industry and ruined it, plunging that nation into a
socialist-driven nightmare. I know that as far as Socialism/Capitalism go, I’m
probably “preaching the choir,” as throughout my own American education I’ve
never run across a single educator willing to make the case for Collectivism
(Socialism, Communism, etc.), but it’s important for us to understand the
symbiotic relationship of the public sector to the private sector. That is, the
public-sector lives/feeds off the life-sustaining productivity of the private-sector.
For that reason, public-sector workers and officials
SHOULD fight to limit, even minimize
the public sector’s workforce.
As an example, OVER
$1 TRILLION has been pretty much wasted since 1971 on America's "War
on Drugs," with judges, prosecutors, court, probation, corrections
officers and police officers benefiting the most. That's produced tens of
thousands of unnecessary positions in those areas, but drug use has only
increased over that period. That’s a failure and a waste of vital resources.
NOT
that this $1 TRILLION should have been spent on education, or roads and
infrastructure, etc., although the latter could've used some more attention
over the past 40+ years, but would've best been left with the taxpaying entities
that it was taken from, because there it would’ve been reinvested in expanding
our industries, creating more good private-sector jobs and increasing the
actual tax revenues of the country.
Private-sector enterprises create products and thus
jobs. Jobs are paid employment in the
production of goods and services sold and used here and around the globe.
Positions are government-created employment that produce no actual revenue. A
firefighter who is paid $60,000/year and gives back $25,000 of that
compensation back in the form of city, state and local taxes does NOT really "increase the tax
revenues," in the sense that ALL
of that compensation (that full $60,000) is drawn from tax revenues, so that
portion going back into the government in taxes, merely reduces the net cost of
that position.
I’ve held a position in the public-sector for over
three decades, with deep gratitude for the private-sector profits and tax
revenues that made that possible. That said, and probably because of that
gratitude, I’ve never wanted the FDNY to increase its membership. In my view, it
SHOULD always remain a small, elite
workforce of people dedicated to fighting fires and responding to emergencies
within that City. The same should be said for all other public-sector
departments.
I support the idea that Municipalities should live
up to the promises they’ve made in the form of pension and benefits. It’s hard
to support the idea that a Municipality should be able to enter into poor deals
that eventually threaten to bankrupt that Municipality and allow those
Municipalities to then back out of those bad deals. That amounts to negotiating
in bad faith in its earlier contract deals. That said, politicians SHOULDN'T be allowed to use bankruptcy threats or State Constitutional Conventions to abandon earlier deals made in good-faith.
However, bad deals that overburden taxpayers and are
unsustainable shouldn’t ever be allowed to be made. We need politicians to
consistently put taxpayer funds ahead of public-sector demands. Either that, or
perhaps all public-sector contracts should be cleared via public referendum.
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