-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.4/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.4/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 4</A> The Laissez Faire City Times January 25, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 4 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ----- Human Goodness Proven Beyond Doubt by Wolf DeVoon Pack a lunch, grab a pencil, and follow me. Perhaps more than other writers, I might have given you the impression that democracy is a combination of institutional folly and criminal conspiracy; that there is nothing we can do to halt bonehead regulation, mounting taxes, urban decline, laughable Wall Street share prices, McJobs that don�t pay a living wage, and global economic collapse on the back burner. The facts are pretty damn dismal. In Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, governments disburse more than 50 percent of their national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) -- which means they have more bureaucrats reclining on public sector divans, pretending to direct economic traffic, than the total number of working stiffs in France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Kenya, Venezeula, Russia, etc. Worse: the U.S. ain�t far behind in this sack race to Stupidville. Depending on whom you listen to, total U.S. federal, state and local government spending is 40-something percent of GDP. It wasn�t always so. At the beginning of the 20th century, prior to the imposition of federal income tax (it started as a one percent levy, declared on a three-line postcard) our total government outlays were less than 10 percent of GDP. So what happened? Metaphorically speaking, we threw a party and invited Big Brother to dance with the whole economy. Part of the problem today is that no one knows exactly how much we've spent. OECD economists and The Wall Street Journal like to assume that current U.S. government spending is about 25 percent of GDP -- which I know for a fact to be wrong, because 25 percent doesn�t fit the OECD equations and White House officials have been trying to convince everybody that total government spending is declining to maybe 31 percent of GDP. Since nobody knows exactly what the U.S. "estimated" GDP or government outlays in FY1998 might turn out to be, let�s armwrestle with the Ghost of Government Past. Our national bank statement for 1993 was revised about nine times and there�s still some official confusion, but the data are cool enough to do a little rear view mirror-gazing. It�s interesting and instructive to see what happened back there, when Bill and Hillary moved in to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. 1993 U.S. GDP = $6.5 trillion Federal outlays = $1.4 trillion (22 percent of GDP) So far, so good. Everybody agrees that American goods and services totalled $6.5 trillion in 1993 and that the Feds spent about one-fifth of national output. How much of the collective pie did state and local governments (schools, hospitals, roads, fire and police) gobble up? 1993 U.S. State & Local Government expenditure: Bureau of Census estimate = $1.0 trillion (15 percent of GDP) Statistical Abstract of U.S. = $1.2 trillion (18 percent of GDP) Grandpa Wolf�s best guess = $1.4 trillion (22 percent of GDP) I�m sorry we can�t be more exact about this. There are 84,000 local government units in the U.S., and most of them can�t add or subtract too good, especially the school districts. Since it�s impossible to get accurate financial data, economists have to guess at the cost of local government. Imagine how hard this is to do in India or China. Anyway, depending on which estimate you believe, total U.S. government spending (federal + state and local) in 1993 was approximately 37-44 percent of GDP. A total of 19 million Americans were directly employed by government agencies in 1993, and maybe 75 million more were defense contractors, road builders, county vendors, subsidized farmers, students, public pensioners, Medicare patients, Food Stamp families and welfare beneficiaries -- roughly four out of ten U.S. households eating from the public trough in 1993. If you run an airline or bus company, 40 percent of your passengers are government "workers," although it�s unclear to me how much work ever gets done at a government agency. If you have a low-paid McJob, standby for a shock: the average salary of a Federal employee in 1993 was $40,000 a year. Local government limped along, paying people an average of $25 per hour in 1993 with a truly astounding array of fringe benefits, like paid holidays (91 percent), vacations (91 percent), jury duty leave (93 percent), funeral leave (70 percent), military leave (82 percent), sick leave (94 percent), medical insurance (86 percent), dental insurance (66 percent), extended care (78 percent), home health care (84 percent), hospitalization (100 percent), inpatient surgery (100 percent), mental health care (99 percent), alcohol abuse detox (99 percent), alcohol rehab (76 percent), outpatient follow-up (82 percent), drug abuse detox (99 percent), drug rehab (74 percent), outpatient counseling (80 percent), life insurance (87 percent), defined benefit pension (91 percent), job related educational assistance (66 percent), severance pay (32 percent), nonproduction cash bonuses (41 percent), and wellness programs (32 percent). Figures are nationwide for local government blue-collar workers like cops, firefighters and bus drivers. Teachers and white-collar bureaucrats enjoy a slightly fatter fringe package, obviously. The next thing to ask is: how big and fast is this Happy Meal growing? Not so swift in Noo-Yawk City, where the number of city employees and municipal payrolls rose slower than U.S. median household income. Elsewhere in the country, state and local governments expanded more or less in sync with general prosperity, as voters demanded more stop signs, better schools, safer streets, mandatory recycling, quieter and busier airports, breast cancer screening, Gulf War parades, UFO investigations, etc. Public works were funded with bonds. State and local debt is about $1.5 trillion, roughly a quarter of the total national IOU, the bulk of which is Federal and permanently unpayable. As a nation, we�ve borrowed every penny we could lay our hands on at home and abroad -- and promised our multicultural grandchildren that the meek shall inherit an industrial black hole. I am sensitive to and appreciative of the fact that most U.S. politicians are trying to reduce the growth of government. Bill Clinton reduced the number of Federal civilian workers, for instance. Well done -- but too little, too late. Transferring Monica from the White House to the Pentagon was like rearranging one deck chair. If Bubba saved a buck on paperwork last year, he blew twice as much tossing Tomahawks at Saddam before Christmas -- and that�s the whole problem in a nutshell. Americans are great at TALKING about deficit reduction and trimming the "fat" from government programs. What we do in practice is spend more every year on schools, hospitals, cops, exploration of Jupiter�s moons, Amtrak and NATO. It is important to understand that the percentage of national output spent on "public goods" determines the fate of a society. The reason that the former Soviet Union collapsed (and its crippled successor, the misnamed Russian Republic, is hip deep in misery) is simple: when government controls more than 50 percent of a nation�s cash flow, "public servants" financially control the electorate, instead of vice versa. It happened in Britain during the 1960s and they had to call in the IMF. It happened repeatedly in Brazil and the IMF is still there, pumping fresh financial blood into a dead Frankenstein economy. When the U.S. tap-dances across the 50 percent "public" GDP threshold in 2015 (when Social Security and Medicare go bust) there won�t be any IMF to rescue us. We are the IMF, bucky. All perfectly dreadful and dire. But... Freedom Ain�t About Voting I can�t take it seriously, because Annie Lennox. (Okay, that�s not a real sentence. Poets don�t always use verbs. Just hang widdit for a minute and get down.) I woke this morning dreaming of clouds and saw the certainty that there is no intrinsic merit in life. These days are golden, painted, illuminated, furnished from a vast store of value that no one could have guessed we would someday squander. Knuckleheads call it the Peace Dividend. In fact, it�s a nuclear war dividend -- the war my father�s generation waged by B52 simulator and proxy with bluster and napalm in pint-sized postcard states like Vietnam, Panama, Korea and Kuwait. It was an important role reversal. My grandfather was a bootlegger during Prohibition (and so was yours, probably) did his best to outsmart the Revenuers, but had an idiot boychild who voted for Truman and Ike, for Kennedy and Nixon, for March of Dimes and UNICEF. When men make a habit of voting, the end is nigh. Freedom ain�t about voting. There are few examples of beauty in Western history, many examples of genius. For instance, I�m listening to Annie Lennox: she just used 11 separately sung notes and about a hundred glisses to sing the word "why" in one, long, beautiful, necessary, 3-measure caress. Chrissie Hynde is another poet. Janis Ian, too. None of them can tell you the inverse square of pi, or the present value of a 30-year Treasury. Artists are not geniuses. We�re lovers. We speak a language that Bill and Hillary never learned. Property can�t buy us, can�t change who we are. Our lexicon of public policy consists of two words: Fuck off. The sad truth of our time is the glory that was decadent Rome, ancient Athens, Louis XIV Paris, a great shower of wealth soaked through to the weakest seed, you and me included. Science is inert by comparison. I�ve read Einstein and Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, Hawking, Sagan and Goethe -- about as vital as a box of Kleenex, the whole crew. Tina Turner could kick their microscopic balls into a jar if she felt like it. And that�s the tragedy of government. It�s so fucking boring and picayune that it draws desperately empty barracudas like Hillary Clinton and her talking hamster. Our public debates are dense. There is no Left, no Right. The whole conceptual framework is a Cliff�s Notes community college interpretation of Friedrich Hegel. No wonder Brits insist on characterizing vote salesmen as left-of-center or right-of-center, meaning neo-communist and neo-fascist, respectively. The notion of liberty is alien and unreal to Europeans. If I hear one more BBC lapdog ask another civil servant "What lessons can we learn?" (from their latest government trainwreck), I am going to become an arms merchant. The eclipse of liberty and extinguishment of privacy in America is likewise near perfect, and we have no one to blame except Sam Walton and Andrew Carnegie, twin progenitors of U.S. geopolitical footsie and Uncle Santa entitlements. Next it will be an international registry of babysitters. I half-expect parenting licenses and goo-goo tests for expectant fathers. I don�t care whether bad money drives out good, or if "Bad protection drives out good." The biggest problem we face is that bad culture is mass murder. No matter what, no excuses, take a mental axe to the nearest Disney ABC-TV transmitter, theme park, T-shirt, video, stuffed animal, cartoon, Coen obscenity and cross-promotion. To hell with Stossel, the whore. Live free or Home Improvement, take your pick. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 4, Jan. 25, 1999 ----- Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved Disclaimer The Laissez Faire City Times is a private newspaper. Although it is published by a corporation domiciled within the sovereign domain of Laissez Faire City, it is not an "official organ" of the city or its founding trust. 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