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Letters by a modern St. Ferdinand III about cults

Gab@StFerdinandIII - https://unstabbinated.substack.com/

Plenty of cults exist - every cult has its 'religious dogma', its idols, its 'prophets', its 'science', its 'proof' and its intolerant liturgy of demands.  Cults everywhere:  Corona, 'The Science' or Scientism, Islam, the State, the cult of Gender Fascism, Marxism, Darwin and Evolution, Globaloneywarming, Changing Climate, Abortion...

Tempus Fugit Memento Mori - Time Flies Remember Death 

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Friday, April 1, 2011

Statism and their Unions, bankrupting America.

A sure model for failure.

by StFerdIII

 

Not a model to follow. Statism in any of its variants always fails. Socialization of a program, a sector, an economic market, or a state, always leads ineluctably to bankruptcy and cultural degradation. There is no disputation on that fact. In reality there are trade-offs in resource usage including supply and demand, price points, utility and quality. If you ignore these important factors in an exchange of products or services you will create dislocations, used by politicians as rallying cries to 'do more' and 'solve market inefficiencies'. Needless to say the initial dislocation leads to more dislocations which over time distort if not destroy price points, real supply and demand interactions, and price-quality relationships. The US housing market is a case in point which led to a massive economic contraction, that we might only be getting out of now [thanks to zero interest rates; the printing of money, and liquifying the banking system, all of which will lead to very high future inflation]. 

An excellent synopsis on what ails once hard-working, creative America is below. Simply put government, its unions, its bureaucracy, its spending, its regulation of every single action or thought is destroying the US. America has become a nation of hand-outs and 'takers', not one of culturally advanced movers and builders:

“Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

...Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees.

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods.

...The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.

Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

...If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.

The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we've gotten.”

All true. Governments are unionized bureaucracies. The average public union worker makes more than 4 times the amount of money than a comparable private sector worker. It is outlandish. Every economic study which looks at government ownership of the economy states baldly that any level of state ownership above 30% is entirely negative. In the US and Canada governments consume 45% of GDP if you add in tax revenues, deficits, and indirect taxation or regulation and fees. This is ridiculous. A lot of this money simply funds unproductive government, public services, socialized and poorly performing education, health, and nationalized or protected industries. A huge part of it is to pay for pensions or life-long salaries for this unaccountable bureaucrats. It would be nice to have more political leaders like Walker the governor of Wisconsin, who have the brains and the brawn to reduce, if not make illegal, public unions.

 


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