Class Warfare: Government Workers vs. the Productive Class

Several times now, I have heard references on the radio talk shows to this struggle between government employees and taxpayers as “class warfare,” a war between the private sector and the public or government sector. Someone on the radio referred to the old phrase, the “haves vs. the have-nots,” but now the “haves” are the government class, except they have acquired what they have through dishonest means: through the coercive, confiscatory power of the State.

And now we have all the unions and teachers and police in Wisconsin protesting state government cuts, while the Democrats in the state legislature are running and hiding like little cowards.

Jason Lewis on the radio suggested that the Wisconsin attorney general should demand a special election to replace the Democrat state legislators who are derelicts of their sworn oaths of office. Will all this turn violent? I hope not, or we might have to call out Rodney King,”Can’t we all just get along?”

Some people have been ignorantly comparing these public employee protests in Wisconsin with the protests in Egypt, referring to the “workers” in Wisconsin as the “common people,” protesting the state or local government who wants to cut their benefits and pensions, when in reality the government and these public “workers” and their unions are on the same page. The real class warfare, the real fight is between the government’s employees and the taxpayers or private sector. It is the actual productivity from the private sector whose earnings, profits and funds are confiscated by the government through its coercive police power, that is used to fund these public employees’ high salaries, benefits and pensions. It is the taxpayers and the Tea Party people who elected the new governor and Republican legislators because they were getting sick of being taken for a ride, sick of their freedom and their right to their own earnings being egregiously whacked.

In total contrast to these Wisconsin protests, the protests in Egypt are for their freedom — freedom from State and police aggression, freedom of speech and religion and dissent, and that’s it (regardless of what the paranoid nutsos on the right want people to believe). The paranoid conservatives view what is going on in Egypt as some kind of insurrection of Muslim extremists. With the conservatives, constant Tea Party “freedom from government intrusions” rhetoric covers what really is their true authoritarian love of and obedience to the State and the State’s authority and power.

So the Wisconsin protests are not like those in Egypt. In Egypt the protests are of the everyday workers (and the students and youths), who don’t like the State and its agents living off the workers’ productivity. The State is a parasite and their leader of 30 years Mubarak has accumulated billions off his own people. But now they have successfully peeled off that leech.

But in Wisconsin, the leeches are the agents of the State who are protesting because they want even more from the actual producers, the productive middle class. And let’s be honest about this now, it isn’t a “living wage” these government employees want or want extended, it’s the extravagant pay, benefits and pensions far above what the market would provide in a free and open exchange, without coercion or threats. It is the extravagant benefit packages that workers in the dreaded private sector could never get. And pensions after the age of 50 or 60 that private sector workers rarely get. None of this has to do with a “living wage,” but in actuality is nothing more than welfare hand-outs.

However, don’t think that I’m just picking on government employees — It’s the same deal with the Wall Street parasites: Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke going into Congress and fraudulently threatening them with “civil unrest” and Martial Law if they didn’t fork over the tax-funded loot, nothing more than extortion. That is what our entire society has become, thanks to FDR, Johnson and Nixon, the Bushes and the Clintons — the Government-Industrial-Parasite-Complex.

And it’s the same damn thing with the military industrial complex, with their false flags, their provocation of terrorism in order to fight it. This literally has become a Sodom and Gomorrah public trough criminal society.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling all teachers and all police “criminals” because of their voracious appetite for extravagant pay packages, overtime and huge pensions and tenure all at the expense of the productive middle class — just most of them — at least in Wisconsin as we can plainly see. No, I’m just kidding. But I agree with Karl Denninger at Market Ticker, who suggests that those teachers who called in sick in order to go to the state capitol should all be fired. And he suggests that there are plenty of people out of work in Wisconsin who are probably intelligent and qualified enough to replace the lying, dishonest teachers.

Now, don’t get me started on teachers’ unions and this thing called “tenure,” now. Give. Me. A. Break. There are too many teachers who suck now, because they are utterly incompetent and just plain dumb, and they have no right to be teaching children. We can’t have dumb people teaching the next generation, but that is what we have had too much of now.

And the police. Now, what is this with police officers deliberately doing overtime in their last year before retirement in order to jack up their pensions? These are law enforcement officers, whose job it is to “enforce the law”! I don’t think that deliberately screwing your fellow neighbors and local taxpayers is a particularly honest way to “enforce the law.”

That is the problem now with the State. Because of its various monopolies, such as in education and policing and territorial protection — and yes, there are private schools, but the State has a monopolistic control over the education industry — there is no competitive incentive for these government monopoly workers to be productive, and to serve the interests of their fellow citizens (and taxpayers), and the poorer quality workers with lower quality output or lower quality work do not suffer any consequences for their poor work, or their lack of productivity, whereas in the dreaded private sector, the bad ones get fired (usually), or their employers go out of business. In the private sector, employers have an incentive to keep better quality workers on the payroll, but in the public, government, monopoly sector, the employers do not have that pressure.

But most of all, freedom is what creates prosperity for the most people in any society. When the State uses its armed power to restrict the people, their rights of association and contract, their right to make use of their property and skills however they want, in order for the State to protect certain professions from competition, that is when more people become less prosperous, and there is less opportunity and productivity in society, and more “strife,” and the more restrictions imposed by the State on society, the more poverty there is.

And with that, all this now is in addition to the budget battles in Washington. I’m hearing that Republicans are saying that Obama’s budget is “dead on arrival,” or that Democrats don’t want to make cuts, they’re really not going to agree on anything substantial.

So here I am reposting excerpts from my article I had on LewRockwell.com in March of 2010, November, 2010: More Rearranging of Deck Chairs, right with this whole post I’ve just done, because people need to realize that none of these elections or anything they do now in Washington is going to make things better, as long as there continues to exist this thing, this centralized federal government, with monopolies, and with more and more intrusions into our lives, our homes, our persons and property.

But I won’t say, “I told you so.”

(From March, 2010 article just cited:)

You’ve probably heard the expression, “Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” which refers to making futile changes to a failing situation. This November’s elections will be such a case of rearranging the deck chairs on Titanic America, because the real problem that needs to be addressed is systemic, and serious systemic changes need to be made.

There will be those who will say, “No, no, don’t say that, we have a chance to win back both the House and the Senate this November!” But these are times that call for a dose of reality. Unfortunately, many people involved with the Tea Party movement seem to have the misguided notion that the Founders’ structure of the federal government is adequate, but that the people in Washington just need to be replaced. However, the Founders’ forming a federal government with centralized power and authority and a compulsory territorial monopoly has been shown to be an immense error. Inherent in such a structure is the violation of property and individuals’ rights to life and liberty, hence America’s steady moral decay over the last century. And inherent in federalism is the violation of state independence and sovereignty…

As economist Murray Rothbard noted,

…first, left-liberals, in power, make a Great Leap Forward toward collectivism; then, when, in the course of the political cycle, four or eight years later, conservatives come to power, they of course are horrified at the very idea of repealing anything; they simply slow down the rate of growth of statism, consolidating the previous gains of the Left, and providing a bit of R&R for the next liberal Great Leap Forward….

Rothbard and economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe have written extensively on these issues. In his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe explains how democratic governments have contributed a great deal to reversing the process of civilization. The real achievements of democracy have been the empowering of some people to legally extract private wealth and property from others, and empowering the political class to use coercion and brute force against others to achieve certain goals.

At the heart of the problem are the temporary nature of democracy and the exploitative nature of a system of compulsion and monopoly. Economically, according to Hoppe, unlike in a monarchy in which the king owns the country’s territory and has a long-term interest in its capital value, in democracies the ruler is a “temporary caretaker,” and

a temporary and interchangeable democratic caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his advantage. He owns its current use but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. Instead, it makes exploitation shortsighted (present-oriented) and uncalculated, i.e., carried out without regard for the value of the capital stock.

Hoppe expands on those ideas:

…a private government owner (a monarch) will want to avoid exploiting his subjects so heavily, for instance, as to reduce his future earnings potential to such an extent that the present value of his estate actually falls. Instead, in order to preserve or possibly even enhance the value of his personal property, he will systematically restrain himself in his exploitation policies…. In distinct contrast… public government ownership will result in continual capital consumption. Instead of maintaining or even enhancing the value of the government estate, as a private owner would tend to do, a government’s temporary caretaker will quickly use up as much of the government resources as possible….

Therefore, a distinct characteristic of government, or “public sector,” activity is lack of incentive and ability in long-range planning, and, because “societal planning” cannot take individual market factors into account, economic calculations are impossible. In the public sector, political calculations are necessary…

Without regard to America’s capital value and actual long-term economic interests, politicians have acted largely on self-interest and short-term exploitation of the system of democratic governance…

Over generations of electoral rearranging of deck chairs and further expansion of government’s size and power, America has experienced a decline in personal responsibility and traditional values. As a consequence of Social Security, families’ responsibility for the care of their elder members is transferred to anonymous neighbors. President Obama’s threatened government takeover of the entire medical system will make FDR’s New Deal pale in comparison.

Thus, America’s structure of government’s territorial monopoly and legislative rule has turned society from one of natural laws guarding individual rights to one of man-made laws that have allowed citizens to covet others’ wealth and property, and has enabled politicians to rise to the top with proficiency in rhetoric but no abilities in producing anything of actual value to others.

The 2010 delusion of correcting government’s mistakes has already begun with Scott Brown’s recent election to the United States Senate. After having voted for socialized health care and fascist insurance mandates in Massachusetts, and opposing cutting the state income tax, Brown was falsely promoted as a conservative Tea Party candidate. And already the Tea Party movement itself, supposedly one promoting independence and limited government, is being pulled into a life of dependence on the GOP, a party glued to the false security of dependence on centralized Big Government’s monopoly of territorial protection. As author James Bovard observed,

We now have the Battered Citizen Syndrome: the more debacles, the more voters cling to faith in their rulers…. The greater the government’s failure to protect, the greater the subsequent mass fear – and the easier it becomes to subjugate the populace.

One way to prevent a huge societal disaster is by decentralizing, the dismantling of the federal government and letting the states have their independence and sovereignty back.

The total destruction of the United States of America will have been wrought by the U.S. federal government. Instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic with more electoral changes, the way to save America will be by decentralization and a return to the sanctity of private property rights, freedom of association and contract, and totally unrestricted free trade and commerce.