Liberal Fascism: Government's Getting Bigger, And You're Getting Smaller

Whoopee. The unemployment rate has dipped back down below double digits to 9.7%. Don’t get too excited, however; we are far from out of the woods, and the private sector of this nation is still reeling. But you know what has thrived so well and even grown since a certain president has been in office? The public sector. We now have a record number of 2.15 million people on the government payroll. Isn’t that super? If you’re an authoritarian big-government Leftist like President Hope&Change, it is.

But it’s not super for the American people; far from it. Government getting bigger and the private sector getting smaller is a dangerous road for our country to be on. And until someone other than Obama-Pelosi-Reid are driving that runaway train, it’s the direction we’re going to be on.

First, let me show this report from the Daily Caller about what’s going on, and then I’ll explain why the facts presented therein are disastrous for our republic—i.e., you and me:

Government hires as private industry fires
February 5, 2010
By Aleksandra Kulczuga

In 2009, as the private sector shed 4.1 million jobs, the federal government was on track to increase hiring by 8 percent. In fiscal 2010, there will be a record 2.15 million federal civilian employees on the payroll.

The census bureau is partly responsible for the increase – they hired the equivalent of 85,000 full-time employees to conduct the national population count. Yet even controlling for the spike in census hires, the federal government is on track to add at least 64,000 net new jobs in both fiscal 2010 and 2011.

And they’re earning more and more. The 2011 average compensation costs for civilian employees of the executive branch is projected at $86,911, a 6.7 percent increase over this year.

“Keep in mind these have been driven up by increasing health-care costs,” said Tom Gavin, an employee of the Office of Management and Budget. He pointed out that the executive branch generally outsources lower-tier work to contractors, so average salaries only reflect those of the highly-skilled talent running the government.

When Barack Obama was elected president, there were 1.9 million civilian employees nationwide — the last time the federal government employed more people than it currently does was 1992. Unemployment around Washington, D.C., where the concentration of government employees is particularly dense, is 6 percent — among the lowest of any major metropolitan area. Seventy-nine percent of new federal jobs between 2009 and 2011 are in the Departments of Defense, State, Justice, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs and most of the increases in the federal government are on the civilian side.

Most of the jobs the government will be adding are skilled white-collar jobs, with a focus on public health, information security, scientific research, law enforcement, and financial services. Across the board, white-collar federal jobs paid an average salary of $74,403 in 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

To put it in perspective, the total costs of salary and benefits for all federal employees this year — both civilian and uniformed (more than 4.5 million people, plus Active Guard and Reserves), is expected to reach $447 billion — a 7 percent increase over the previous year. …

Nationwide, the average annual salary for a federal employee in 2008 was $66,293 — compared to $45,371 in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And if that isn’t enough to depress you, there’s more. In the following Washington Times piece, Ed Fuelner, president of the Heritage Foundation, has some figures pertaining to the current and future cost of government jobs:

Jobs we all pay for
Public sector expands at the expense of the private 
By Ed Feulner  February 2, 2010

Americans often wonder where all our tax money goes. Well, a good chunk finances a steadily growing government work force. State and local governments spent $1.1 trillion on employee wages and benefits in 2008. That’s half of what those governments spent overall.

Also, while the private-sector job market remains bleak, there are more civil service jobs than ever. The U.S. Labor Department projects wage and salary employment in state and local governments will increase 8 percent by 2018. That’s a comforting thought for anyone who has to spend time in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Wish we could be as confident about the prospects for creating new corporate and manufacturing jobs to help pay for these new hires.

It’s not simply the number of new jobs that costs taxpayers. It’s that these government jobs pay more than ever. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that state and local government workers earn almost $40 per hour in wages, salaries and benefits. That’s more than 25 percent higher than the combined compensation of the average private-sector job ($27 per hour).

Public-sector employees have more paid leave and receive more than twice the health insurance benefits of private-sector employees. And government employees are famously more secure. …

There’s a bigger problem. Lord Keynes famously said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.” Before they die, though, millions of retired state and local bureaucrats will drain trillions of dollars from taxpayers.

A report by Robert Novy-Marx and Joshua D. Rauh found that government pension funds are unfunded by about $3.2 trillion. That’s an extra $27,000 that each American household will need to pony up in the decades ahead.

The price tag is so large because more than 80 percent of government workers are still eligible for old- fashioned defined-benefit retirement programs. State and local governments are making massive spending promises, and taxpayers will have to pick up the tab. By contrast, such pension funds are available to just 20 percent of private-sector workers.

Civil service workers are also a throwback because they’re heavily unionized. Last year, about 7.9 million public-sector employees were in a union, while just 7.4 million private-sector workers were. More than a third of government workers pay union dues, while just 7 percent of the rest of the work force is unionized. …

These developments are not good, because they are a harbinger of the type of nation the Obama administration is forcing this nation to become: A nation less free.

It is no coincidence that the countries with the least freedom—economic or otherwise—have the biggest governments, and vice versa. The liberal drones in the media and Washington mock and dismiss the Tea Party movement and last summer’s passionate town hall attendance as just a bunch of angry mobs (racist to boot) who are merely anti-government. Well, that’s an oversimplification, but basically right. To put it more accurately, they are anti-big government. No conservative wants no government; that would lead to anarchy. Mark Levin and other constitutionalist conservatives have explained it and even written about it: All we want is limited government, which does only what the Constitution prescribes. The liberal—an Orwellian term; they’re actually Leftists or, as Levin calls them, Statists—wants government to overstep the restrictions of the Constitution to achieve the agenda they believe in. It’s un-American to the core.

This point was made by Dennis Prager in a September 2009 article. He argued that the bigger the government, the smaller the individual:

Here are five reasons why bigger government makes less impressive people.

1. People who are able to take care of themselves and do so are generally better than people who are able to take care of themselves but rely on others. Of course, there are times when some people have absolutely no choice and must rely on others to take care of them. Life is tragic and some people, despite their best efforts and their commitment to being a responsible person, must have others support them.

Even if one believes, as the left does by definition, that the ideal society is one in which the state takes care of as many of our needs as possible, one must acknowledge that this has deleterious effects on many, if not most, citizens’ moral character. The moment one acknowledges that the more one takes care of oneself, the more developed is his or her character, one must acknowledge that a bigger state diminishes its citizens’ characters.

Presumably one might argue that there is no relationship between character development and taking responsibility for oneself. But to do so is to turn the concept of character, as it has been understood throughout Judeo-Christian and Western history, on its head. The essence of good character is to care of oneself and then take of others who cannot take care of themselves.

2. The more people come to rely on government, the more they develop a sense of entitlement — an attitude characterized by the belief that one is owed (whatever the state provides and more). This is a second big government blow to character development because it has at least three terrible consequences:

First, the more one feels entitled, the less one believes he has to work for anything. Why work hard if I can look to the state to give much of what I need, and, increasingly, much of what I want? Second, the more one feels entitled, the less grateful one feels. This is obvious: The more one expects to be given, the less one is grateful for what one is given. Third, the more entitled and the less grateful one feels, the angrier one becomes. The opposite of gratitude is not only ingratitude, it is anger. People who do not get what they think they are entitled to become angry.

3. People develop disdain for work.

One of the effects of the welfare state on vast numbers of European citizens is disdain for work. This is in keeping with Marx’s view of utopia as a time when people will work very little and devote their large amount of non-working time writing poetry and engaging in other such lofty pursuits. Work is not regarded by the left as ennobling. It is highly ennobling in the American value system, however.

4. People become preoccupied with vacation time.

Along with disdain for work, one witnesses among Western Europeans a preoccupation with not working. Vacation time has become a moral value among many Europeans. There have been riots in countries like France merely over working hours. In Sweden and elsewhere, more and more workers take more and more time off from work, knowing they will be paid anyway. In Germany and elsewhere, it is against the law to keep one’s store open after a certain hour, lest that give that store owner an income advantage and thereby compel a competing store to stay open longer as well. And, of course, Americans are viewed as working far too hard.

5. People are rendered more selfish.

Not only does bigger government teach people not to take care of themselves, it teaches them not to take of others. Smaller government is the primary reason Americans give more charity and volunteer more time per capita than do Europeans living in welfare states. Why take care of your fellow citizen, or even your family, when the government will do it for you?

This preoccupation with self includes foreign policy: Why care about, let alone risk dying for, another country’s liberty? That is the view of the world’s left. That is why conservative governments are far more supportive of the war efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan than left-wing governments of the same country. The moment the socialists won in Spain, they withdrew all their forces from Iraq. The new center-left government in Japan has promised to stop helping the war effort in Afghanistan.

Very cogent arguments, if you ask me. Very frightening and demoralizing as well. Which is why the notion of big government has always been antithetical to the values and traditions of American society.

Don’t get me wrong; government has been growing for quite some time—when FDR introduced the New Deal, when LBJ introduced the Great Society, when Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education, and even when George W. Bush established the Department of Homeland Security. But the way the government is growing and the private sector shrinking under the Obama administration is unprecedented. And, in my opinion, it is deliberate. 

• The more government, the less control you have over your own life and health. 
• The more government, the less of your earned income you get to keep and do with what you deem fit. 
• The more government, the less choice you have in how to educate your children. 
• The more government, the less choice you have over what you eat, what you drive, and even what you say. 

And Barack Obama and the power-hungry Democrat Congress know it.

I weep for this nation.