Conservative moral relativism on public employment, explained in two newspaper articles

[Scuba]

From Uppity Wisconsin.


Conservative moral relativism on public employment, explained in two newspaper articles

Poor Rick Esenberg. The entire premise of his blog on public jobs -- that, hey, economically speaking they're not really jobs -- effectively gets shot down by a page one story in the very same issue of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in which his blog is reprinted.

...

In his blog, Esenberg pooh-poohed a professor's quoted concern that Wisconsin recently has lost a total of 18,800 government jobs, thus shrinking the state's economy.

Esenberg says that these public jobs must be paid for by taxes (and, he forgot to mention, various government fees on individuals and businesses). He says cutting the jobs frees up those public dollars for other purposes and therefore this is all just a sort of zero-sum game.

But flip from the opinion pages to the Journal Sentinel's front page and we are told an entirely different story. A big headline there today trumpeted the apparently disturbing news that congressional mandates might whack the US defense budget by half a trillion dollars. "Unless Congress and the White House can agree on a plan to reduce the federal deficit," the article read, "Wisconsin stands to lose more than 11,000 jobs from military spending cuts scheduled to begin in January."

The right-wing spin machine just keeps on churning out the lies and deceptions.

BTW, get ready for the "economy will suffer if we cut defense spending" bullshit, as if dollars spent by nurses, teachers and retirees don't help the economy while dollars stuffed in the bank accounts of corporate investors do.

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[Scootaloo]

2. They're pathologically unable to understand how it works

Government workers provide services to the community.
Their labor is both more efficient and cheaper than most instances of private service in the same sector, due to the government's lack of profit motive.
Government workers receive payment like any others; this payment is then spread through hte community as htye purchase goods and services themselves.

It's especially that last part they don't get, since they also can't comprehend that wealth actually "trickles" up, and so the most obvious route towards elevating the living standards for society as a whole is to subsidize the poor and not the rich.

But it's like trying to explain how to count to ten to a horse.

[reformist2]

3. It's not even true that new jobs in private sector are better for economy than public sector jobs.

It all depends on whether those jobs actually increase the wealth of society (a hard to define term, admittedly) or not. I would argue that a teacher paid for by taxes is better for the economy than a casino worker paid for by the private demand for gambling.

[Scuba]

4. Excellent argument, thanks.

[OnionPatch]

5. I try to explain to conservatives

That there's not that much difference between a public job and a private one except that "We the People" have pooled our money (through our taxes) to hire someone (a public employee) for their services instead of paying them directly as a private citizen. Pay them directly, or pay them through a common pool......where's the big difference? Their money spends like anyone else's and is just as much a part of the economy.