The public sector ain’t what it used to be, and thank goodness. Consider:
The wire services are trying to drum up hysteria about a shortage of public-school teachers and school principals. It turns out that young people have developed other aspirations besides being slaves to the government and its brainwashing schemes. They especially have no desire to enter into the administrative bureaucracy of a decaying system. The wages are tolerable and secure, but it’s an awful way to fritter away one’s talents. A mind is a terrible thing to waste working for the government.
Politicians are proposing state and federal programs to boost interest and income in these fields. But whatever they do to stop the hemorrhage out of the public schools, it will not correct the larger problem – a problem, anyway, from the point of view of the government. The trouble is this: not just the public schools but all its bureaucracies are in decay, experiencing an unprecedented brain drain to the private sector. Daily, talented people decide that huge pensions and secure jobs don’t provide enough compensation for being drones for Leviathan.
The New York Times ran a study on the State Department in particular, whose Foreign Service was considered the elite bureaucracy, the one that attracted the best and the brightest into its much-ballyhooed diplomatic corps. The exams to get in were notoriously difficult, and being called back for an extended interview was considered an extreme honor. No one would think of turning down an offer.
No more. The smartest no longer bother. If an offer comes, it is often turned down. Interviewers have noticed that the talent pool they have to chose from grows dimmer by the day. And the people who presently work in the bureaucracy are leaving in record numbers. As the Times puts it, "talented diplomats are leaving for careers that they believe have more power and prestige in the new global economy. And college graduates who used to rush to take the Foreign Service exam no longer bother."
The reality is that the diplomatic corps is no longer where the action is. Hardly anyone pays attention to paper shufflers from government agencies. To be among them is to make little or no impact on the world. And where are the rewards? You work your way up based on connections and time served, not creativity or genuine accomplishment. And even when you get to the top, what are you doing? Writing memos nobody cares about, attending endless meetings where nothing happens, and otherwise trying to make your boss look good.
The private sector’s profit-and-loss mechanisms rewards companies that promote the best people, and punishes companies that become bureaucratized and irrelevant to the lives of regular people. Especially in this economic boom, companies have to be more attentive to the consumer and the international commercial landscape than ever before.
The world of Dilbert – bureaucracy, dumb management, time wasting, irrational strategies, and undefined missions – applies in spades to the public sector. A Dilbertized company will be punished severely in today’s business environment, while one that rewards its employees, serves the public, and stays on top of daily affairs excels and attracts the best people. How can the State Department compete in that environment? Today it can offer none of the risk, reward, idealism, and positions of consequence that government seemed to offer during its glory days.
Several studies have been conducted on the problem and concluded that the State Department must change its system of recruitment and remuneration. But this isn’t going to solve the long-term problem, which has a much deeper root: the status and prestige of government work isn’t what it used to be.
This is something we should celebrate! If government were small and unintrusive, as it generally was in the early 19th century, you wouldn’t mind if its offices were filled with highly educated people from old families with social prestige. But when the government is bloated and most of its powers illegitimate, and it is trying to run or bomb the world, we are far better off having its offices populated by discards nobody else wants.
Ineffective government is always a blessing, but especially now. The less government we get for our money, the safer are our freedoms.
The actual problem is that the world has changed dramatically from fifty years ago, while the government has not. The central state as we know it is a product of an ideology of central planning that has failed, and an administrative apparatus that is completely outmoded in a world where the market economy is the driving force.
Look at the global system of embassies and other State Department offices. As the ultimate brick and mortar institutions, they were created before Instant Messaging, email, and faxes. If there really is any "diplomacy" to be conducted, the self-appointed leaders of the world would be better off getting a solid internet connection rather than wasting tax money building new palaces for themselves. How about using an online Chat Room for the next meeting of the World Trade Organization, for example?
How can the government regain its prestige? Leslie Gelb at the Council of Foreign Relations offers this guide to a New York Times reporter: "The State Department will be able to attract anyone it wants when once again the building becomes the center of making foreign policy and foreign policy strategy," he says. "Good people want to work at places that are at the center of things."
The answer, then, from the point of view of the state, is to put itself at the center of things. And that is precisely why anyone who loves freedom should oppose all efforts to shore up the status of life in the bureaucracy. We should celebrate the decay of the state, and find ways to encourage this glorious trend in which good people who want to be at the center of things avoid anything having to do with the government.
September 8, 2000
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He also edits a daily news site, LewRockwell.com.
