[Simplicity]

Originally Posted by Arts

because a nurse is not a bureaucrat, nor is a classroom teacher, nor is a social worker that deals with clients. This is not a closed loop, it's a service we choose to pay for - if we paid no tax, then hired nurses and teachers directly out of our own pockets, it's still nearly the exact same amount of economic activity.

The reason you don't see eye to eye with me is because you are dismissing the value of the service you (we) receive for our tax dollars - you refuse to acknowledge that indeed most public sector workers count towards productivity, and that public sector employees also pay taxes at the same rate structure as private sector workers.

You've obviously missed the entire lesson.

Social workers are bureaucrats. A nurse, is a bureaucrat. They're part of a large bureaucracy. Do you see the etymology of the word? Good.

Now, a nurse, for instance, is stuck in a closed loop. The government sets the pay, the government sets the demand (infinite - no ceiling), and the government sets the rate of service - or the supply. There's almost literally no market intervention within the province. If we were to hire nurses and teachers out of our pockets, we'd pay attention to their value. We wouldn't just set a rate and pay it perpetually ignoring all of their performance. Our ability to pay may actually enter the equation. We would probably discourage the unnecessary usage. In fact, we almost wouldn't have a free-rider problem at all; like induced demand for anything, the more you hire, the more you'll use them. Their productivity is only measurable by how productive they make others. That's their value. So their value would be considered break-even to the government up to a point, and then any extraneous productivity they created in others would be considered the marginal benefit, if any. But they are paid out of taxation receipts generated by the private sector. And given that nursing and most medical costs are generated in the latter parts of one's life where they are mostly unproductive, your argument falls mostly flat. In fact, one could very easily argue that nursing costs economies more than it gives back taking into account the ridiculously expensive procedures that are done near one's end of life in the interest of extending the most economically unproductive years of one's life at the highest cost - an argument for another day.

But again, a nurse and a social worker are not 'productive' for the most part. The argument is that over the long-term they are supposed to save economies money by being 'social goods' - something we can't prove. The same argument could be made for paying people to dig holes and fill them. Technically, we're redistributing income. You think that's great. I know it to be otherwise. Unless there's a marginal benefit to a service, that service is a loss leader, especially when governments go into debt to pay for them. The idea that only government employees spend money and that's why we should give them more always is dumb. They aren't generally productive - they're services we can't properly value who are always receiving wage increases at the expense of the private sector. That they're not producing enough value to justify themselves is evident by recurring deficits and growing debt. Especially given that our economy has been 'growing' when we know otherwise.