Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Hey, Kids! All Government Employees are Apparently Teachers, Police, or Firefighters


Hey, Kids! All Government Employees are Apparently Teachers, Police, or Firefighters

By Barry Rubin

[Warning: sarcasm and irony are employed as devices in the following article.]

It is really wonderful how every day I learn something new. Now I've learned that all government employees can be divided into three professions: teachers, police, and firefighters. As to who busts people for drinking from excessively large cups in New York City or has the wrong sandwich in their school lunches of North Carolina; who protects the snail darters and makes sure that America doesn't solve its problems of energy pricing and supply by new methods and pumping oil in the Gulf of Mexico; who enforces the 8000 or so pages of federal regulations; and who goes over all those forms people fill out and passes around all that paper and inhabits the EPA, departments of education, housing and human services, etc., etc., etc? Your guess is as good as mine.
 
There are thus two essential points to remember:

1. Government bureaucrats--be they on the federal, state, or local level--don't exist.

2. If  they do exist they can never be laid off. Every single one of them is essential. Only teachers, firefighters, and police can be laid off if there isn't enough government income. Get rid of the teachers and keep the bureaucrats who enforce increasingly more complex, restrictive, and intrusive regulations!

Oh, and remember that it's better to run out of money and fire teachers than to ask them to contribute a percentage point or two of their salaries to their own pensions so that nobody need be fired (see, Wisconsin).

What nonsense and rubbish forms the basis for the way the currently dominant elite argues--and its tame mass media report--public issues nowadays!

And consider how the income of those Wisconsin state employees has dramatically risen now that they don't have to pay union dues but can pocket the money themselves rather than donate it involuntarily to partisan political campaigns that are ultimately against their own interests.

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