A Tale of Two Countries

theodp writes "Over at TechCrunch, Jon Bischke is troubled by the growing divide between Silicon Valley and unemployed America. While people who spend most of their days within a few blocks of tech start-up epicenters are enjoying a boom/bubble, the number of unemployed now eclipses 14 million nationwide, labor under-utilization is 16.2%, and the mean duration of unemployment has spiked to 40 weeks. 'Which bring us to an important question,' writes Bischke. 'Should Silicon Valley (and other tech clusters throughout the country) care? After all, as long as people in Nebraska or the Central Valley of California have enough money to buy virtual tractors to tend their crops in Farmville, should the tech community be worried about whether those same people are getting paid to do work in the real world? Is what's best for Silicon Valley also good for America?'"

Comments

A Tale of Two Countries

[roman_mir]

Any private enterprise is good, especially if it does end up creating destructive technologies, because after all, wealth is not work, it's things we produce and can then own.

The real question that was left an-asked should be this:

Should the unemployed country care about where Washington DC is taking the country?

The real question is what is up with the divide between the public and private sectors?

Work in the public sector should be about sacrifice, it should not be a better place to make more money, instead the workers there enjoy very stable and secure working conditions. However this is not what the public sectors is or has been about for over a hundred years now.

Today working in the public sector is profitable, it comes with various perks - the workers are famous, they are swamped by armies of lobbyists, who are working on behalf of those, who are being regulated/taxed/subsidized based on the decisions made in the public sector.

USA sees values of its housing market decline except for places where there is high competition with foreign investors (N.Y., L.A.), but the most growth in every way is found in Washington DC. Growing housing market, growing salaries, growing everything.

Public workers do not pay income taxes.

That's right, they don't pay income taxes, because to pay an income tax, income must be made, something must be produced of value, so whatever counts for income taxes there is just what they don't get in salary. There are all sorts of perks being a public sector worker.

So what do you think, do public sector workers share the same problems as the rest of the country?

When a public sector worker talks about sacrifice, he does mean that everybody must sacrifice but him, because whoever does actual work - creates something and sells something, that person lives off his own labor. A public sector worker lives off the labor of others.

When a public sector worker strikes, he really is only trying to negotiate a deal between himself and some other politician, and that's definitely an Alien vs Predator situation, because it doesn't matter who wins there, the actual tax payers lose, either in money or in some way that has to do with policy.

The real question is what about these 2 countries: the government workers VS everybody else? It's not about employer VS employee, as the public sector worker wants you to believe.