by John Rubino
Dollar Collapse
Criticizing the “public sector” is tricky, because teachers, firefighters, cops and bus drivers are by-and-large great people doing hard things that benefit the rest of us.
But there’s this problem, which is that once a country’s public sector grows beyond a certain size, it takes on a life of its own, demanding more resources even as the money to fund that growth runs out.
Elected officials find that they have no choice but to increase pay and pensions and eschew reforms that might make those increases manageable. Taxpayers and financial markets eventually crack under the strain, and an epic battle ensues between public and private sectors that ends in some version of national bankruptcy.