> Working for the government does not grow the government.
Working productively for the government, specifically when non-government alternatives exist, does.
Let's say you work in transportation, should you work for the DoT or the company that owns all the toll roads in the region?
Let's say you do a damn good job for the DoT and because of your work you drive the the cost per traveled mile per person (or whatever the applicable measure is) to a fraction of the same for the private toll roads. You've just justified that government is in fact better than the private sector. The local general assembly passes a law that the toll road should become public property and a forced takeover is instituted. Government is grown.
But you could work for the toll road company, drive their costs down while expanding their owned network, demonstrate that private road ownership, a pay-for-what-you-use system is the best. It beats paying taxes on roads you won't even drive on! Private road companies start taking over all the roads and the DoT becomes nothing more than a small regulatory body. Government is shrunk.
You have a choice, participate in government or not. If you believe the government cannot be effective, and you still take the government job, you become part of the problem and that's hypocrisy full stop. If you do a good job, you defeat your own argument. If you do a bad job, willfully (to try and prove government can't work) or not (just laziness and incompetence), then I question the need to retain you either way.
The U.S. at least has such a large private sector, it dwarfs the public sector, that there's very little excuse in going government vs. finding a commercial job somewhere.
Interesting point. I see how that applies in your DoT / toll road example but that works because they are in a sense two competing entities. That's not the case with a big chunk of the government. For example, a highly productive patent office employee really doesn't do anything to justify the office's existence unlike your DoT worker example. In some ways, issuing a lot of patents might actually prove the patent office should not exist.
Well, to specifically look at your patent example. Patents are one of the few things most types of Constitutionally focused Libertarian movements explicitly allow (U.S.C. Article 1, Sec 8, Clause 8).
But more generally, there are lots of things that only governments can do, that no free-market alternative can provide comparably, or can provide structure to where the non-government solution provides inefficient chaos.
People often use government mandated standards as the example. "Drinking water must have no more than x parts per million of y" and then provides testing and enforcement of those standards to ensure some minimal level of safety. And if some act of God means local drinking water becomes undrinkable regardless of efforts to clean, the government also carries out public awareness and warning campaigns and offers remediation guidelines.
Nothing stops private industry from providing better than those standards of water, but private industry generally doesn't. Given a set of minimal standards, private industry almost always targets those standards (but not better and of course there are exceptions). Now imagine what gets targeted when there are no standards and no enforcement of the standards? Is the water safe? or does it just not taste bad? I've been in countries where there was effectively no government oversight and the water tasted fine, but would land you in a hospital.
And there are many cases where private industry gets caught not providing that minimal standard and enforcement actions occur. Or industry that has nothing to do with water provisioning ends up contaminating water so badly that people's tap water lights on fire or whatever.
Industry self-regulation sometimes works, but just as often has been shown to not work well at all.
Your analogy works only in the particular case of industries where there's public and private competition; it doesn't apply to many cases. For example, my country doesn't have any private toll roads. How would working for the State prove that it's more effective than toll roads?
And believing that the State cannot be effective is just one of the reasons to oppose its growth. There's more opposition to the State besides the Tea Party, you know?
Working productively for the government, specifically when non-government alternatives exist, does.
Let's say you work in transportation, should you work for the DoT or the company that owns all the toll roads in the region?
Let's say you do a damn good job for the DoT and because of your work you drive the the cost per traveled mile per person (or whatever the applicable measure is) to a fraction of the same for the private toll roads. You've just justified that government is in fact better than the private sector. The local general assembly passes a law that the toll road should become public property and a forced takeover is instituted. Government is grown.
But you could work for the toll road company, drive their costs down while expanding their owned network, demonstrate that private road ownership, a pay-for-what-you-use system is the best. It beats paying taxes on roads you won't even drive on! Private road companies start taking over all the roads and the DoT becomes nothing more than a small regulatory body. Government is shrunk.
You have a choice, participate in government or not. If you believe the government cannot be effective, and you still take the government job, you become part of the problem and that's hypocrisy full stop. If you do a good job, you defeat your own argument. If you do a bad job, willfully (to try and prove government can't work) or not (just laziness and incompetence), then I question the need to retain you either way.
The U.S. at least has such a large private sector, it dwarfs the public sector, that there's very little excuse in going government vs. finding a commercial job somewhere.