It is unethical to voluntarily participate in a scheme that is fundamentally unethical (and that one agrees to be fundamentally unethical) when one can easily find other means of employment. "Anarchists" like yourself and Huemer should consider this question more seriously in my view.
2 of the worst k-12 teachers that I had my mother also had. I felt sorry for the guy who was the worst, he worked all those year unable to control a class, his classes were chaos for my mother and me 30+ years apart. In private schools he would not have been teaching for long.
what you say about libertarians accepting government employment makes perfect sense to me. But what are your thoughts on why so few people are participating in the Free State Project, given the plausibility of the ‘actions speak louder than words’ principle? What does it tell us that even staunch libertarians cannot be bothered to move to a different place within the same country? Does it mean that people/libertarians don't care about liberty/libertarian values all that much?
Unlike being employed by the government, living in an unfree state *is* bad for libertarians. This, at any rate, is what libertarians seem committed to. Libertarians believe that *everyone* suffers massive rights violations at the hands of the government. If this is so bad, more or less everyone who is aware of this should have a strong reason of self-interest to escape these rights violations.
Given the plausibility of the ‘actions speak louder than words’ principle, the most plausible explanation seems to be that libertarians don't *really* mind living in a (relatively) unfree state and having their rights trampled on. At least they do not care sufficiently to consider moving to a different state. They might believe a libertarian order to be superior to the status quo, but not sufficiently so as to offset the costs of moving places within the same country. Does not this reflect badly on libertarianism/the libertarian movement? Does it mean that, compared to the status quo, a libertarian political order would only be 'nice to have', at least for those already living in relative affluence?
This is a question that's been on my mind for quite a while (and which I’ve posted before - apologies for posting it again), precisely because there seems to be a lot of truth in the 'actions speak louder than words' slogan. Would love to hear your (or other readers’) thoughts on this.
If the gov't pays above-market rates, we'd see more and more candidates apply for these jobs until the competition to get a tenured professorship was comparable to the competition to get a similarly compensated job in the private sector, right?
Like Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen got their PhD's at Princeton, Caltech and Harvard respectively. I'm sure they could have had lucrative careers in the private sector, if they'd wanted to. So did they really get a "great deal" teaching at GMU, or was it just a reasonable deal?
At a societal level, it always seems to me that there should be a better possible tradeoff between "government job with almost complete security and stability" and "market job with utter insecurity and stability".
The current status quo heavily skews the talented but risk averse into government and education, where, frankly, most talents are wasted.
Market firms, on the other hand, make better use of talents, but the pressure and threat of being fired or simply having to uproot your family and move or change jobs is orders of magnitude higher, and that's something that a lot of people rightly shy away from.
I don't know that this is a market failure, per se. It's systemic, but it is a failure that's over time leading to bigger divergences and hence, bigger problems.
Singapore is famous for being exceptionally well-run, and less famous for paying extremely high salaries to (at least senior) civil servants. To attract competent people. It seems to work.
Maybe we're making a mistake by offering low pay to (at least decision-making level) civil servants.
(I don't know a lot about it, but it seems to me the high compensation, vs. market rates, is mostly offered to low-level employees, and low pay vs. market is offered to high-level staff. Probably should be the other way around.)
So I see excessive job security and slack to goof off as problems - we want people to fear getting fired if they do a poor job. High pay, in itself, seems less of a problem. The problem is the that we offer high pay but don't demand high performance.
Spot on. As a retired government worker, I totally agree. Any guilt you may feel should be alleviated by your guerilla activities. Keep preaching but watch your six! See RSAGE
I kind of agree, although I would argue that most professors are also net negatives for the economy. Otherwise, if we could just figure out a way to sit every would be regulator in a room where they could endlessly write memos and feel like they were saving everyone from themselves while collecting a paycheck, but in reality being entire detached from affecting the rest of us, that would be a program I would pay a lot of taxes for. A mental ward for the bureaucratically insane.
It's item on the last list that is the problem. Whistle blowing is almost always career death in the public sector
It is unethical to voluntarily participate in a scheme that is fundamentally unethical (and that one agrees to be fundamentally unethical) when one can easily find other means of employment. "Anarchists" like yourself and Huemer should consider this question more seriously in my view.
There are takers and makers in an economy. Government employees are takers
2 of the worst k-12 teachers that I had my mother also had. I felt sorry for the guy who was the worst, he worked all those year unable to control a class, his classes were chaos for my mother and me 30+ years apart. In private schools he would not have been teaching for long.
Bigger government leads to more and more government employees creating greater negatives for the economy.
Hi Bryan,
what you say about libertarians accepting government employment makes perfect sense to me. But what are your thoughts on why so few people are participating in the Free State Project, given the plausibility of the ‘actions speak louder than words’ principle? What does it tell us that even staunch libertarians cannot be bothered to move to a different place within the same country? Does it mean that people/libertarians don't care about liberty/libertarian values all that much?
Unlike being employed by the government, living in an unfree state *is* bad for libertarians. This, at any rate, is what libertarians seem committed to. Libertarians believe that *everyone* suffers massive rights violations at the hands of the government. If this is so bad, more or less everyone who is aware of this should have a strong reason of self-interest to escape these rights violations.
Given the plausibility of the ‘actions speak louder than words’ principle, the most plausible explanation seems to be that libertarians don't *really* mind living in a (relatively) unfree state and having their rights trampled on. At least they do not care sufficiently to consider moving to a different state. They might believe a libertarian order to be superior to the status quo, but not sufficiently so as to offset the costs of moving places within the same country. Does not this reflect badly on libertarianism/the libertarian movement? Does it mean that, compared to the status quo, a libertarian political order would only be 'nice to have', at least for those already living in relative affluence?
This is a question that's been on my mind for quite a while (and which I’ve posted before - apologies for posting it again), precisely because there seems to be a lot of truth in the 'actions speak louder than words' slogan. Would love to hear your (or other readers’) thoughts on this.
If the gov't pays above-market rates, we'd see more and more candidates apply for these jobs until the competition to get a tenured professorship was comparable to the competition to get a similarly compensated job in the private sector, right?
Like Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen got their PhD's at Princeton, Caltech and Harvard respectively. I'm sure they could have had lucrative careers in the private sector, if they'd wanted to. So did they really get a "great deal" teaching at GMU, or was it just a reasonable deal?
I hear that all the time from government employees. That they could have lucrative private sector careers if they wanted. The fact is they don't.
At a societal level, it always seems to me that there should be a better possible tradeoff between "government job with almost complete security and stability" and "market job with utter insecurity and stability".
The current status quo heavily skews the talented but risk averse into government and education, where, frankly, most talents are wasted.
Market firms, on the other hand, make better use of talents, but the pressure and threat of being fired or simply having to uproot your family and move or change jobs is orders of magnitude higher, and that's something that a lot of people rightly shy away from.
I don't know that this is a market failure, per se. It's systemic, but it is a failure that's over time leading to bigger divergences and hence, bigger problems.
Singapore is famous for being exceptionally well-run, and less famous for paying extremely high salaries to (at least senior) civil servants. To attract competent people. It seems to work.
Maybe we're making a mistake by offering low pay to (at least decision-making level) civil servants.
(I don't know a lot about it, but it seems to me the high compensation, vs. market rates, is mostly offered to low-level employees, and low pay vs. market is offered to high-level staff. Probably should be the other way around.)
So I see excessive job security and slack to goof off as problems - we want people to fear getting fired if they do a poor job. High pay, in itself, seems less of a problem. The problem is the that we offer high pay but don't demand high performance.
In the private sector, there's a real chance that good performance doesn't save you.
In the public sector, there's a real chance that bad performance doesn't hurt you.
Neither is very good.
Is job security really such an important thing to most people? It never has been very important to me.
This post needs a Ron Swanson reference!
Spot on. As a retired government worker, I totally agree. Any guilt you may feel should be alleviated by your guerilla activities. Keep preaching but watch your six! See RSAGE
I kind of agree, although I would argue that most professors are also net negatives for the economy. Otherwise, if we could just figure out a way to sit every would be regulator in a room where they could endlessly write memos and feel like they were saving everyone from themselves while collecting a paycheck, but in reality being entire detached from affecting the rest of us, that would be a program I would pay a lot of taxes for. A mental ward for the bureaucratically insane.
The Ron Swanson theory of government!