Yes sir, it has finally happened.
With UK government spending at 52% of the GDP, and some entire regions of it being based on almost entirely public sector jobs, looks like they have surpassed the heavy government involvement for which much of the Eastern bloc was notorious. Even France has government spending being 60% of GDP, and that’s larger than even the government of the German Democratic Republic ever was. Hell, Cuba’s economy only has 29% government spending (albeit that it is heavily regulated as a communist nation). The most modest there is 43% of Germany, and that’s still more than the 35% that used to be there in socialist India in the 1980s.
I remember seeing an advertisement for MI6 officers in a few magazines, which had the testimonies of people saying, “My life is so much better than all my friends in the private sector. They just do routine work at the same place, while I am travelling all over the world! My pay is good too!” I thought it was amusing, because I got this sense of an overcompensated inferiority complex from it. “Pfah! What do those private sector guys know? I have got a government job that’s cool. With…perks and stuff.”
I find it embarassing, because all this reminds me of what grown-ups tell me of days in socialist India, when the only opportunities available were government jobs, and people used to think it was a big matter of status to become a District Officer or the Senior Undersecretary to the State Office of the Income Tax Commisioner. My father got his first job as a rupees 1,700 a month job back in 1983 as senior manager in a public sector insurance company, and it was big deal for the entire family and neighbours that this happened. Obviously, all he did was to go to a place with a five hour working day with only two hours of work, and he was never happy about the lack of serious work for a smart man like him. And that salary was just enough to pay his rent and food expenses while remitting the rest to maintain his already elderly parents. So this is what it has come to. People glorifying their jobs as diversity officer or members of public health and safety.
SHAMEFUL. Absolutely SHAMEFUL. I am sure you’ll build a society scolding people in workplaces for not hiring enough obese people for workplace diversity or ordering police to arrest children who litter parks. Really, forget about what private sector work in actually feeding, clothing, sheltering, energising, networking, connecting, and funding your life will do. Oil exploration has nearly stopped in this era. Yes sir, I am going to drive my car, and it will magically refuel itself as the pump will automatically lift itself out of the station and into the car socket, and somehow have the fuel materialize there; no worries on whether more oil sources need to be explored; they will magically appear and find their way into my car as quickly as it comes out of the ground. I am sure all those unionised Mexican oil national monopolies will make do with increasingly less oil production and stoppage of all new investment in exploring more sources in North America. It’s just too hard, like breathing or being alive.[*-)]