Today’s government workers receive not only better medical benefits and retirement packages than private employees, but significantly higher base salaries, too — as well as easier working conditions and greater job security.
I’ve talked a lot about how this has contributed to the current out-of-control spending at federal, state, and even local government levels.
But one thing I haven’t done is mention how old hat this is. Karl Marx would have raised an eyebrow in recognition of this trend, and then stifled himself. For this kind of thing was predicted by the thinkers he got his exploitation and class theories from.
Only those thinkers did not identify “capitalists” as the exploiters. They saw unlimited government as the exploiter — with net tax consumers as the class (or classes) that government exploitation sets up.
The ideas of the French Industrialist School are not well known, today. They should be. Kids should learn in school about the ideas of historian Augustin Thierry and economists Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and other followers of the great J.B. Say and Thomas Jefferson’s friend and favorite economist, Destutt de Tracy.
Real class tension, today, exists not so much between “rich” and “poor” (that’s socialist diversion) but between government employees — who make up a quickly growing sector of today’s otherwise moribund labor force — and the taxpayers who fund their salaries and benefits.
We need another revolutionary shift — but not of a Marxist variety. We can do better. Less violent, more sensible. Can’t we?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.