Public Sector vs. Private Sector Ontology

While I was growing up in the 1950s, government workers were regarded as fairly noble civil servants who sacrificed wealth attainment in the private sector for a satisfying career in public service. My parents never worked for any government entity, but they always spoke respectfully of those who did.

Upon my graduation from college, the private sector chose me, when a recruiter determined my major and various test results made me a candidate for sales work on Wall Street. Excepting the half-credit course for USAF ROTC, I have never been compensated by a government entity. I somehow managed to work every day of my fifty professional career years at risk in the private sector. Returning to Wall Street in 1992 following a fourteen-year career as a television anchor/host, including for the Wall Street Journal, I somehow managed to support my family on essentially one income—practically impossible for most young people today. I therefore look with interest at DOGE.

During the eight years immediately following college, I began to notice a certain condescending attitude among colleagues toward “government work,” and government workers. Other than teachers, police, and firefighters, I didn’t know many government employees—although I had been vaguely aware during my college years at Rutgers that some faculty there were paid by “The Government.” The incestuous relationships between higher education and federal research grants were generally regarded as beneficial at that time.

Fast forward fifty years—and having had some time now in retirement to reflect more deeply—the differences between private sector employment and what has devolved into “government work” are being blurred by a complicit political class and its public-media minions. There is both needed illumination and necessary disruption involved in the DOGE process. Entirely legitimate, DOGE reveals clearly the differences between private and public sector employment…and employers.

Notwithstanding “crony capitalism,” totally dysfunctional tax policy, and the fundamentally flawed and profoundly immoral monetary policies on which those are based, the funding for government employees is provided by taxpayers. The funding for private sector employees is provided by producers of goods and services, whose incomes—like those of government employees—have been taxed since 1913. The key difference, often overlooked, is that—whereas private companies must pay employees compensation in a competitive labor market, with revenues earned by measurable production, are answerable to boards and shareholders, and are always at risk of market forces—no such discipline has existed in the federal government workforce since August, 1971. That was when the last vestige of financial order in the world was severed, unleashing, among other things, a political class—drunk on artificial money and credit—to inflict near-fatal wounds on the economy of the United States, and by extension, the world. The insidious process of inflation has only exacerbated these wounds.

DOGE is the legitimate remedial process put in place by a duly elected President of the United States and his administration to heal wounds which have been festering for more than half a century. One need only study the history of “progressivism” since 1848, and connect the dots, to realize that DOGE is bitter medicine, to which some may understandably object.

As the prophet Jeremiah put it: “...The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”