I was only semi-seriously skimming a blogpost about the purported “costs” of privatization when I stumbled upon this tidbit:
The privatization process also laid waste to jobs that, while low paid, provided good benefits, civil service protection, union representation, and self-respect. Those lost jobs represent costs, personal and public, tangible and intangible.
This gobbledygook mirrors the one I debunked in my government-financed (which is to say, politically controlled) scientific research post earlier today: It is simply not a legitimate function of government to provide jobs for the sake of jobs. Even if the Broken Window Fallacy somehow did not apply (i.e., how many jobs were destroyed by the unnecessarily high taxes that once funded these now-laid-waste jobs?), the purpose of government jobs ought to be to provide those services that are legitimate functions of government in their own right.
The purpose of a police force is not to employ auto mechanics, but to provide police protection. The purpose of a courtroom is not to employ janitors, but to provide justice. The purpose of a government job is not to foster “self-respect,” but to perform a needed function for the taxpayers who fund that government job.
(Incidentally, how much “self-respect” actually comes from having a job that you know is only there to, um, give you a job?)
To summarize the thesis: The government should, in classic Broken Window Fallacy style, destroy private sector jobs in order to create (“low paid”) bureaucracy positions that, while not necessarily legitimate functions of government — indeed, not necessarily “necessary” one way or the other — that might foster someone, somewhere, with some sense of (cognitively dissonant) “self-respect.”
Splendid.
Kip’s Law: Every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner.