Could you explain how private sector services are fundamentally different from government services in an economic sense?
I am not being argumentive; this is something that I occasionally think about but cannot really arive at a good way to look at it.
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What is the difference between a private and a public position?
In the private sector a service position only exists if it helps a company produce more cheaper or the service is thought to be valuable enough such that people will pay for it. Public sector positions are there to fill a position created by a regulation of the government.
If the EPA makes a rule that only so much of a toxin can be released by a company, a public sector employee will go through all of the calculations and monitor the system and then fine the company or make them buy a more expensive permit to continue doing business. This ends up in the cost of producing a material to rise but doesn't actually help produce anything of value. A private sector consultant dealing with the same regulation the government issued will go to a company, make all the calculation and monitor the process and tell the company that by changing a process or adding a bit of equipment they can stop emitting that toxin and run the system more efficiently, resulting in less waste and a cheaper cost of producing the material.
Look at security. In the private sector a company will hire a security guard to make sure no one vandalizes their property and they can continue running without downtime. In the public sector, a company will pay for police, but they aren't going to guard their property, They'll wait until some penniless punks destroy a piece of equipment and then go hunt them down. After the police catch them they may fine them or send them to prison but at mot the company is ony going to get the the money for the piece of equipment from an insurance company and then end up paying higher rates or losing their insurance. They are never goung to get back the cost of being shut down for a week because their equipment was destroyed in the public sector.
The private sector positions are there because they fill a need. The public sector positions are there because the government has created a situation that requires a public employee to regulate. The government is essentially breaking a companies window and then making the company pay someone to fix it. There may be many people working, but there is nothing productive being done because if a position was actually necessary than someone would be willing to pay for it.
Much of the work done by the government is punishing victimless crimes and requiring fees for work not performed. If you put an addition on your house you hire a contractor. When you had that addition built a public employee inspected it and signed off that it was well built, but if it collapses the city does not assume any responsibility. He collected a fee from your construction but what valuable service did they add then? If you had an insurance company inspector come and inspect your addition and it collapsed than the insurance company would pay for it and then go after the contractor to pay them back for his poor construction.
Would you hire a private investigator to come to your house because a neighbor kid spray-painted your fence or someone stole your $10 lawn chair? Maybe if it happened enough you would, but for a one time occurrence of course you wouldn't, but you call the police. Having the police come by for something trivial like that costs more in man hours than if you had hired a private investigator. Obviously the time spent investigating the case of the missing lawn chair is not producing enough value to warrant the money spent, but what's worse is that the money wasted on that is taken from people who if they had control of the money would have spent it on something that was worth at least the amount of money they were trading.
I could go on and on but the main thrust is: Every dollar not used by the government is either invested in companies, which makes them increase production, or given to companies in exchange for goods. Every dollar spent by the government is essentially paying someone not to work since society does not value their job enough to pay them directly for it.
