Losing your job sucks.
We all empathize with people who get laid off, as we should, including the formerly untouchable federal government workers.
What was it Ronald Reagan once said? “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours.”
I’m guessing you’ve lost a job or two to layoffs, reorganization, or economic changes. I sure have, because that’s what happens in the private sector, all the f—ing time.
As painful as it is, might federal workers be getting the adulting they need? Could it possibly help them empathize with the private workers their regulations, mandates, bureaucracy, and taxes have made unemployed?
In my elitist hometown of Boulder, where an absurd percentage of people make their money from government jobs or contracts, there is an entitled sense that pedestrian worries like “job security” are for the little people, not the sanctified, command-and-control class.
Smug alert in Boulder
Last week’s nearly all-white public temper tantrum on the lawn of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s prime real estate drew an estimated 1,000 people to virtue signal their superiority more so than protest layoffs.
Interesting NOAA doesn’t headquarter on much cheaper land in a much less expensive town. If they were in Lamar, what would the demonstration look like?
From its mountaintop perch overlooking Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro is the 100-foot-high Jesus statue “Christ the Redeemer.” Boulder has a similarly worshiped religious icon perched above the city. Nestled in front of the majestic Flatirons is the pink cement slab building of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR.
No other buildings are allowed on our precious open space except this huge edifice to government. If its sign said “Exxon,” instead of “NCAR,” Boulder mobs would tear it down so the land could return to nature. But we don’t mess with religious symbols.
What struck me about the NOAA protest was the pure elitism of its messaging. They seemed completely unaware, as all of Boulder is, it reeked of “we are the educated, credentialed class and without us you riffraff would be lost.”
Here’s a quick sampling of the handheld placards waved, see if you can spot a theme:
Hands off science! Trust science! Support science! Respect science! Stand for science! You can’t fire science! Science makes America great! Science = real!
Subtle, ain’t it.
We got it, Boulder. Scientists are the high priests of your faith. And we have absolutely no right to demand a better return on their work.
A false dichotomy
These signs drip with the self-importance of the social engineering class, removed from reality of where the money that feeds them comes from. They have become an overfed entitlement class of their own.
Scientists are supposed to be good with numbers. I mean, after all, they’re not journalists. Since 1950, our population has a bit more than doubled, but government employment has gone up nearly five-fold. What’s the science behind that?
Given our debt is at a never-before-seen 120% of GDP, their jobs are paid with money borrowed from our great grandkids. Doesn’t the science say there has to be a reckoning?
Doesn’t science say the sooner we tackle unbridled government spending the less pain there will be?
Like the well-spoken elite who populate Hollywood, academia and the legacy media like NPR, these people have no realization they are the reason President Donald Trump was overwhelmingly reelected. They can’t smell their own smugness; they think the rest of the country is like Boulder.
The question is not if science is needed. It is. In this case, the question is can government-run meteorology be done at a lesser cost? Not one sign addressed that question.
These protests knowingly push a false narrative, a false dichotomy. Either we pay for all these government employees, or no one will be able to track the weather.
Government has no competition, no market force to make it more efficient or innovate. The only time there is even a small possibility of efficiency or innovation is when budgets get slashed.
Just talk to the telephone operators, travel agents, and even income tax preparers who are all replaced by technology. But, heaven forbid, innovation happened in government.
Hey, government workers, that’s what losing your job feels like. It really sucks, don’t it.
Can you follow the science and make the connection your work growing government has done this to private sector workers for decades?
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
