US election

[amateur]

1 hour ago, Mungler said:

I have a theory. 

When I was at school, all the kids who left around GCSEs went out into the world and onto the tools or into a family business. Many were not suited to the class room environment. Those that stayed visible, grafted and became successful self starters. Real jobs, real work, long hours with early starts and touching cash and a real connection to actual real money and the real world, working in an ‘eat what you kill environment’.

Then there were those that stayed on to A level who were pretty much on track for office jobs either after A level or after degree.

Of those, those with a penchant for English lit, social sciences and the ‘ologies’ fell to the left and the dreamier side of life. They ended up in the left leaning universities and in careers where ambition was not particularly required or where they would make no difference and headed into the public sector for an easier life - the next 40 years entirely mapped out, pay rises, career progression and pensions automatically catered for, shorter working days, union membership  longer holidays and extras gained by staying still.

Everyone else one way or another fell into the real world and chased money and in so doing fell into productivity and being productive. Some did fall into corporate machinery - those with ambition climbed the greasy pole, others stayed put and settled for the same desk for 40 years. 

As an aside I got a holiday job in a large insurance company in my late teens and there I saw people in their early 30’s with retirement clocks on their desks counting down the next 30 years. It was dystopian. Any one of them could have been hit by a bus and no one would have cared or noticed, certainly not the actual business they worked within. 

One of my brother’s best friends from school got A levels, went to a left leaning university and on leaving joined the tax office and the office workers union (etc) where he is now 40 years later. I remember one of his first roles was being assigned to a project that lasted a year to select the correct photocopiers for the office. The lack of energy, enthusiasm, productivity or return was off the chart. He said at the time they could have wrapped the project up in a week but it was in no one’s interest to do so and there was no pressure on them to accelerate. The embodiment of unproductive. Indeed, you could not get any further away from ‘eat what you kill’.

The public sector is a basket case - the human machinery that runs the state is ideologically captured, entirely unproductive and we’re lumbered with it. To my mind, the only way forward is to shrink government, shrink the state and teach mandatory economics alongside maths and English to at least add a commercial counterbalance to the dreamy nonsense injected into kids that remain in education.

There is no chance of educating a civil servant who is 20 years in and institutionalised. The only way is to limit the entire machinery by having small government / small state. However our election cycles won’t allow for that - the Conservatives get in and block 50,000 public sector jobs, but 5 years later Labour get in and announce an extra 50,000 public sector jobs. 

If only people understood that for every public sector employee you need at least one productive private sector employee to pay for them. Everything has to be paid for. 

.

 

Yup

[Gordon R]

Mungler - sadly, very accurate. It doesn't make pleasant reading, but I can't argue against it.

[Rewulf]

7 hours ago, Mungler said:

If only people understood that for every public sector employee you need at least one ten productive private sector employee to pay for them. Everything has to be paid for. 

Fixed that for you.

[Yellow Bear]

1 hour ago, Rewulf said:

Fixed that for you.

May still be a little light.

[Mungler]

1 hour ago, Rewulf said:

Fixed that for you.

Thank you. I stand corrected.

I’ve said this before but everyone should listen to this Brendan O’Neil show podcast (deals with growth and the cost of the public sector). 

I just wish more people were economically literate; if they were we’d have long sorted out the NHS, nationalisation wouldn’t not be on the table and the public sector would be but a handful of properly managed and motivated people. I dream of course.