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Would you agree with an employment law requiring the federal government to hire only the best qualified, cheapest person who applies for any particular federal job? In other words, it would become illegal to use any other criteria for hiring, apart from merit and cost. Maybe the law could even be broader than that. Maybe it could require the government to regularly re-advertise every position, and replace incumbents with better qualified or cheaper alternatives.
Isn’t that just good stewardship of the collective treasury?
The reason I ask is the stable, continuous unelected government workforce used to protect the public from the worst side-effects caused by unqualified or incompetent elected public officials like Mayor Adams or Governor Hochul. But unfortunately, the government workforce has now been diluted or partly replaced, maybe by DEI, with people just as incompetent and unqualified as are the elected officials.
So we are now flying the national airplane without a political parachute.
And why should government hire anyone for any reason besides merit and cost anyway?
Would you agree with an employment law requiring the federal government to hire only the best qualified, cheapest person who applies for any particular federal job? In other words, it would become illegal to use any other criteria for hiring, apart from merit and cost. Maybe the law could even be broader than that. Maybe it could require the government to regularly re-advertise every position, and replace incumbents with better qualified or cheaper alternatives.
Would you agree with an employment law requiring the federal government to hire only the best qualified, cheapest person who applies for any particular federal job?
What the fuck makes a road "public"? Oh yeah, the uniformed armed guards who arrest you if you don't pay their bosses. Isn't that called armed robbery?
What makes it "public" is that the road was build and maintained at taxpayer expense.
Do you really think all roads should be free for alls, driving as fast as one likes, in whatever lane one likes, with traffic control lights and signs as optional? Nobody should get a speeding ticket?
Though everyone would agree in principle that you can’t get something for nothing, it seems this truth gets completely forgotten the moment government spending comes up. “How could you be against Internet infrastructure?” people might say. “Don’t you care about Internet access?” Of course I do. But I also recognize that money spent on Internet access is money that can’t be spent on food, healthcare, education, or housing. And unlike the proponents of these programs, I don’t presume to know what consumers most urgently need. ...
So, how do we systematically determine which uses of resources are the most valuable to consumers? With the government, this is impossible. Politicians and planners are simply “groping in the dark,” as the economist Ludwig von Mises put it. Sure, they’ve got all sorts of statistics, but the statistics paint at best a blurry picture of the relative needs of consumers.
Fortunately, there is an alternative: the market. On the market, profits and losses signal to entrepreneurs the relative value consumers place on different goods and services. These signals lead to a remarkable coordination between the needs of consumers and what gets produced. It’s not perfect, of course, but at least there is a mechanism for rationally allocating resources to meet the most urgent needs of consumers as best as possible. ...
The fact is, free-market proponents do care about human welfare. In fact, it is precisely because we care that we are against government spending! The question is not whether to have government-funded initiatives or let people suffer, but whether to have the government or the market allocate resources.
A proper understanding of economics, we believe, leads to the conclusion that market allocations tend to be better for the well-being of everyone than government allocations. Thus, far from being an act of misanthropy, our opposition to government spending actually stems from the very concern for human welfare that the left erroneously thinks they have a monopoly on.
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