Canadian David Warren offers an excellent analysis of the state of the states in our welfare states.
Yet when we speak of "entitlements," or more precisely, against them, the first thing we face is public sector entitlements -- in Canada as in every other western or quasi-western country. The troubles the Greeks are now experiencing with their civil service, which is in a position to bring the country to a halt, is a warning for the road ahead.
And forget Greece, look at California. There one may see in clear North American daylight what a vast unspeakable public bankruptcy looks like. It was not an inevitable thing. Gentle reader need only compare, candidly, California with Texas -- which is flourishing, and whose voters know why. Economic decline is a choice, not a fate, and it has everything to do with big, intrusive government.- - - -
Cutting public sector pay -- relative to private sector -- is more than a fiscal necessity. It is also a moral necessity, though using that word more in the sense currently conveyed by the word "morale." With money, job security, and administrative power, comes prestige. We need to reduce that.
This is one of the points that was grasped in the earliest stages of turning India around, by such as the late Rajiv Gandhi. The argument was that business and all other private activity suffered, because the country's "best and brightest" were magnetically attracted to the prestige of so-called "public service." It was what upwardly mobile parents prepared their children for.
But through that "public service" came the self-serving blindness and arrogance of India's "ruling caste." These were people who did not have to stoop to pleasing the labouring masses, in the way capitalists must, if they are going to sell anything. Instead they acquire the attitudes that I have found here, too, in almost every encounter with a "public servant," dressed in a little authority.
HT: Luke Froeb at Managerial Econ
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