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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (11432)	5/1/2002 12:17:58 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

You can discuss these disgruntlements with someone else. I was only discussing with you the productiveness of public employees versus private. Useless and counterproductive programs like those are created and sustained by government employees. If the program they are working on is not useful or is counterproductive then I don't think it makes much sense to call them productive. Ok in some senses of the word they are productive - dictionary.com 1.Producing or capable of producing. 2.Producing abundantly; fertile. See Synonyms at fertile. 3.Yielding favorable or useful results; constructive. 4.Economics. Of or involved in the creation of goods and services to produce wealth or value. 5.Effective in achieving specified results; originative: policies productive of much harm. I would say they are productive according to definitions 1 and 5. I was talking more in terms of definitions 3 and 4. Of course what is favorable or useful is subjective. Yes, OUTCOME (in the context in which I stated it) is the only factor. When people are receiving the service for which they are paying (let us say crime-free streets, for example), they don't care much about the internal wherefores and why. When people are paying for crime free street they do care about more then the outcome. If they had to give all their wealth to the government in taxes, and they where poor and starving they would obviously be concerned about all that input as well as the outcome. Yes taxes are not that burdensome, but then most government programs do not produce something as important or almost universally desired as crime free streets. I said the choice was essentially an illusion. The choice from the private sector is not essentially an illusion. It is so much greater then the choice you could have in issues involving the public sector as to be a difference in kind not just degree. You are if you think they are less productive employees than private sector employees. I have shown you over several posts how misguided and erroneous that idea is. You have done nothing of the sort. You have made a reasonable argument that public sector employees are good at doing their jobs and are held to higher standards then many private sector employees, but you haven't conclusivly shown even that. But if that was accepted for the sake of argument it still would not show that they produce more useful goods or services per unit of input then the private sector, both because the basic missions of some parts of the public sector are misguided or counterproductive, and because despite these standards public sector employees can be less productive then the private sector even when they are providing useful service due to things like lack of competition and less flexible work rules. Look at the US Postal Service vs. Federal Express for an example of this. All jobs recruit employees with varied capacities for meeting the specific types of production required by the various employers. This discrepancy in job-specific "usefulness" is reflected in the pay which compensates particular levels of competence, skill, education, and ability within the economic paradigm of supply and demand. High pay, education, competence, skill doesn't mean that the job is automatically useful. These things would make it likely that the employee would have the ability to do useful work, but if the tasks the employee is given are useless then it doesn't matter how fantastic the employee is. As you know, most private services and products are used by only a miniscule segment of the population. Out of millions of private companies, most individuals or families probably only find a tiny percentage useful to them personally. I mean who really wants to buy a parachute, and why would I buy a sphygmomanometer? Nonetheless, it does not mean their employees are not productive, even if someone dislikes a particular private concern. They are producing a good or service for which there is a market demand and they are increasing the wealth of the country and the opportunities available to everyone, even if those opportunities are not to important to you (for example if you don't want to buy a sphygmomanometer). If you don't want to buy a parachute no one is making you buy one, and if very few people want them you won't get a massive amount of resources poured in to creating them. At least some functions of government (for example the government manipulation of agriculture) are wealth destroying, like some of the old Soviet state enterprises the output is less then the input, and perhaps less then 0 when everything is considered. Tim