Sometimes the seemingly most complicated issues are actually very simple, the trick is explaining them in simple parables so that everyone can understand it. One of the great examples of this is Leonard E. Read's essay explaining how the entire market system works by explaining the simplest of everyday items in "I Pencil".
I hope to explain something which is really quite simple at it's core, but seems to get complicated by-emotions. It is also about economics but is seldom portrayed that way, it is about Big Government and I'll attempt explain it in a way that is simple to follow.
The Library
I like libraries, mainly because I love to read and anywhere there are books, I feel comfortable. I believe libraries are very important both for our educational needs and for our society as a whole, they are a critical component to the advancement of a society.
How does a Library get the books to stock it's shelves? Well I'm sure that an employee in the Library procures them, but who pays for them? The Librarian does not reach into their own pocket and buy them. A library, no matter how many overdue books, is not a money making entity. No a library receives it's money to purchase books, in one way or another primarily through one government agency or another. Oh there may be "friends of the library" organizations that help support them, but for the most part libraries exist through the taxes of others.
The Librarian for all their worth to society generates no income to the enterprise for which they labor. They produce nothing that can be bought or sold, they generate no profit, in fact if a librarian is let go, it saves their employer (the taxpayer) money. A Librarian like all Americans pays taxes, but the truth is if the librarian was paid less the amount of their tax burden the net affect would be the same because a Librarian's taxes are only being recycled back to them self, while the rest of their salary is being paid for by others. A Librarian is a public servant.
If a library is shut down, it saves everyone in the community it serves money. Every book, DVD, magazine-every shelf, card catalogue, computer -the building, the maintenance and its upkeep are not there as in the private sector to generate revenue but rather it takes revenue from others. From a purely economic standpoint, a library is a luxury to society, it is a drain on it's resources.
The people who work in public service such a librarian work as hard I guess as those in the private sector, but they are paid by the labor of those in the private sector and not the other way around. They are public servants.
A factory that builds meaningless widgets for sale to the public, generates profits that can be taxed, creates jobs which provide a tax base for luxuries like librarians or even teachers, policeman and firemen. The more libraries, the more drain on society so the greater the need for the private sector to generate wealth to support it.
Free Ride
In our current economic troubles, the only segment of society that is creating job growth is government. Government neither generates revenue nor creates wealth. All government does to obtain money is tax, government creates nothing to generate profits. Governments can build libraries and hire librarians which cost the private sector even more money. Government can build roads by hiring private contractors, but since profit is not their motive efficiency is secondary-if that. Normally government institutions have the goal of spending all their money so as to insure further budgetary funding, further wasting money which must be taxed from a shrinking private sector.
As government grows, it sucks the lifeblood, money, out of society. Since government has no profit motive like you or I or any buisness, it must compensate by generating something else taxes and regulation. Taxes to fund itself and regulation to control society to perpetuate and protect itself.
Usually in the past, when we have gone through severe economic down turns, we cut back on the luxuries-libraries until things turned around. When we have not sacrificed luxuries for productive (profitable) enterprise we have prolonged our pain, this is what happened in the Great Depression, we attempted to fix the economy with government and it drug on and on until a war pulled us out of it. We are not only doing the same thing now, we are amplifying it through some misguided idea that we can just generate debt to avoid the pain.
Unless something changes soon, we are looking at not only massive government, less liberty but generations of economic pain. We are selling future generations of Americans into slavery, including your children and grandchildren, because despite what you are being told and may believe- you can not spend your way out of debt. You know this, I know this, we know this-there is no free ride.
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