Jobs again

I just get a kick out of the reactions that you read when an economic report comes out. Now I understand that the people writing have two issues they have to deal with, writing for an uncertain audience which means having to over explain things, and dealing with their own point of view, bias.

When the jobs report came out, it was generally treated as horrible since overall the economy lost 131,000 jobs. A lot of these jobs were the elimination of temporary census jobs and as much as these jobs were somewhat discounted when they were created, they should be just as discounted when they go away. Consider them a constitutional blip that comes every four years.

Now, if you take that out of the report, what you have left is the loss of local government jobs and the creation of private industry jobs. Now, I would like to see a lot more private industry jobs created but that isn't going to happen until the economy gets a lot more robust and/or the government figures out how to incentivize business in this country a lot better than they seem capable of.

But going back to the primary trend, every public job eliminated reduces to some extent a burden on the taxpayer and every private job created increases the tax base. Yes, public workers pay taxes too, I should know, but that is simply returning a bit of what they got from the taxpayer in the first place.

This was an excellent trend for the economy, although once again, not enough private jobs. Public jobs are certainly important and necessary, we need teachers, police, and firemen (of either gender) and there are many other functions that have to be performed. Still, there is always going to be some level of inefficiency in government (of course in private industry as well) but a private job is a net revenue creator while a public job is generally a net revenue loser.

It doesn't have to be this way, if we consider the value added of a public job and make sure the value provided is greater than the cost. If you consider police activity, certainly the prevention of crime is paramount. This is a high value endeavor, if the crimes are real. Certainly a crime that destroys property or inflicts bodily harm needs to be prevented if at all possible. However, what about victimless crimes?

When you consider vice and drug offenses, and to some extent traffic violations such as speeding, who is the victim and why are the police intervening? Now, traffic violations may actually generate revenue but the last statistics I saw indicated a tremendous number of people in jail for drug offenses. Why? Really, if we legalized most drugs and put them under FDA oversight, instead of being a crime it would become an industry.

Yes we would have addicts but would that be worse than the addicts we already have plus the tremendous cost of enforcement? I'm not encouraging anyone to use drugs, but in all honesty, why do I care?

You either believe in individual responsibility or you don't. The same with vice. Why do I care what consenting adults do as long as it doesn't involve minors or uninvited violence? I may not approve, but I don't approve of lots of legal things already, such as smoking. It just isn't my business and it certainly should cost society as much as it does to try to prevent it.

Lots of people would and have argued that it would cost more to ignore it. Really? If it was legal, and taxed, it would generate more than enough revenue to support rehab and education efforts. The economics are clear.

Look, less government is a good thing since it equates to less taxes. More business is a good thing since it equate to more taxes. When are we going to wize up?