I had a conversation with someone the other day about the $100 million budget shortfall the City of Toronto is dealing with. The solution that the city has come up with is to reduce services, which will primarily target non permanent bureaucratic workers. This person was not pleased with me when I suggested that the government needs to start outsourcing many of the current governmental jobs out to private corporation in order to cut down on excess salary payments. I explained to this person that a lot of money could be saved by not having to pay inflated union salaries and cutting down on the number of workers required to complete a job (due to higher private industry productivity derived from merit based promotions rather than seniority based, and steaming union protected laziness). This person refuted this idea by saying that the people working in the government have families to raise and so it is important that there are a lot of high paying government jobs for this reason. Basically this argument entailed that having a wasteful government is justified on the basis that people need to raise families and thus are entitled to high government salaries.As citizens of this country we should be outraged but comments like these based on flawed and somewhat idiotic logic. The taxes that every one of us pays out of our pockets every year is not for the purpose of supporting ridiculously high governmental salaries packages, and the families of the governmental workers.
The reason we pay taxes is so we can receive communal benefits that our society deems necessary and thus we charge the governing body with the responsibility of the management of these funds. Thus paying out huge governmental salaries to workers who’s jobs could easily accomplished by the private sector at a fraction of the cost does not fall within this mandate. If private corporations are able to do the same work at a lesser overall cost compared to the bureaucratic organizations currently assigned the work, then it is safe to say that our government is not doing its job of successfully managing these funds. Simply put, it means that money that should be going towards social services and support is being redirected towards the pockets of government employees as well as wasteful and redundant bureaucratic infrastructure. Outsourcing to the competitive private market would allow our taxes to be extended to important underfunded programs that matter in the well being of society, while possibly even providing tax payers a relief from the tax burden (thus increase the monetary welfare of society).
Union and government workers will obviously get upset at the though of we as a society making our taxes work more efficiently and bettering the welfare of countless people in this city, province, and country. This is of course driven by their selfishness and the belief that thier welfare takes precedence over that of society as a whole. We do not pay taxes so they can receive lucrative salaries for their unproductive work that lack any form of innovation or progress. They will always suggest that the tax payers pay more taxes in order to solve any budget shortfalls, but this is a huge mistake for several reasons. The first a repeat of the point made earlier about the reason we pay taxes, and how they are not to support lazy government jobs. The second is that doing this rewards bureaucratic organizations for their lack of productivity and thus reinforces their wasteful behavior. Instead of working to better productivity and reduce the organization’s footprint and better efficiency, they are given monopolistic bailouts that will lead to a swelling of the size of the organization.
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