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08.07.2004, 21:18

Überall das Gleiche mit dem Staat... / Artikel mises.org, engl.

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Why Be Proud of Government Work?
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by
Christopher Westley

[Posted
July 8, 2004]

<img alt src="http://www.mises.org/images3/menatwork.gif" align="right" border="0">Recently,
when walking home from work, I was passed by one of those red monster pick-up
trucks with an oversized bumper sticker on the back window that announced:
FORMER MARINE.

It made me wonder why it is that
Marines are the only federal employees who feel the urge to proclaim that they
once were paid with taxpayer loot. You never see Volkswagens buzzing
around town with a sign that says FORMER POSTAL WORKER, or Lexuses
chugging down the street with a sticker proclaiming FORMER FEDERAL
FISHERIES STAFF ACCOUNTANT.

So, what's with the Marines? Like
any other federal employee, they live off of other people's money (acquired
via conscription), they operate on a socialist model, they specialize in
bullying people, and they are always faithful (semper fi!) to the
government bureaucracy, whether or not that bureaucracy is acting in accord
with the Constitution (or natural law).

In other words, they are different
from federal housing clerks in degree but not in substance.

Normally, I’d sympathize with
such individuals. Despite the pay and benefits, no one said that working for
the military was easy (although it often is). This is especially true for the
troops sweating it out on the streets of Baghdad, many of whom signed up for
National Guard service believing that two weekends a month and two weeks a
year meant just that. They are, nevertheless, simply another variety of
federal workers bearing grenades and guns instead of paper clips and White
Out.

Both sets of workers freely chose
to pledge their lives in exchange for a share of the stolen goods locked away
in the Treasury for the most economic of reasons: that course of action
benefited them more than the next best alternative. But while one worker
finds himself in the air-conditioned bowels of the Department of Waste
building somewhere near the <ST1:PLACE>
Potomac</ST1:PLACE>
, the other crosses himself every time he gets on the Baghdad Beltway. It
doesn’t seem fair.

But it is predictable. Whether
bureaucracies comprise the welfare or warfare states, they must spend their
budgets this year in order to justify bigger ones next year. This insight was
not accepted into the mainstream of economic thought until the development of
the Public Choice school in the 1960s, but long before that, the Austrian
school considered the economic analysis of bureaucracies as fair game. For
instance, when Mises analyzed bureaucracies in Human Action in 1949, he
merely emphasized the main points he raised in his classic 1944 book Bureaucracy.   

As recently as 1995, Rothbard
noted that

<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
Bureaucracy is necessarily
hierarchical ... because [it] grows by adding more subordinate
layers. Since, lacking a market, there is no genuine test of"merit"
in government’s service to consumers, in a rule-bound bureaucracy
seniority is often blithely adopted as a proxy for merit. Increasing
seniority, then, leads to promotion to higher ranks, while expanding budgets
take the form of multiplying the levels of ranks under you, and expanding
your income and power. Bureaucratic growth occurs, then, by multiplying
levels of bureaucracy.

[/i]
Such layers continue to fester
unless constrained by a strict constitution (which is rare) or other
institutional constraints (such as a gold standard). The result is hardly
congruent with a peaceful and orderly society. A bureaucracy's very existence
is based on involuntary trade, implying the introduction of some violence,
whether in the form of tax system enforcement or of bullets fired by those
federal employees stationed out on the fringes of the American Empire.

The festering explains the general
resentment toward government. One can sense it in the total disgust felt
toward the two major parties' presidential candidates. One can measure it in
the size of record budget deficits and projected inflation. One can see it in
the popularity of a recently-released documentary that questions the moral
legitimacy of the warfare state and its sycophants. After a certain point, the
waste is obvious.

When that happens, shame is the
proper reaction on the part of those who helped cause it by participating in a
system based on transferred—as opposed to created—wealth. After all, you
don’t see the same kind of pride of work on the part of U.S. Department of
Agriculture price fixers that you do among Wal-Mart employees. Why is that?

The answer is because a life
devoted to fidelity to Leviathan in a government bureaucracy is neither a
badge of honor nor the mark of a meaningful life, and most every former
federal employee knows it—except, perhaps, the former leathernecks who
cruise by during my walk home from work.

People who devote their lives to
private enterprise, on the other hand, might be told that they are greedy and
selfish but they know in their hearts that they have been serving others
within a framework of voluntary exchange all their lives.

_____________________________

Christopher Westley, Ph.D., teaches economics at
Jacksonville State University. See his Mises.org Daily
Articles Archive. Send him MAIL.
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Prosciutto 08.07.2004, 21:20 @ - Elli -	Das gehört nicht zu den geschützten News? (o.Text)
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Überall das Gleiche mit dem Staat... / Artikel mises.org, engl.

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