The Refuge of the Useless Without Employment References

A practical manual for turning inefficiency into state policy

THE REFUGE OF THE USELESS WITHOUT EMPLOYMENT REFERENCES
A practical manual for turning inefficiency into state policy
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

Someone once said, and was censored, “…they pretend to work and, … I pretend to pay them a salary.”
The story of a country where the unemployed find temporary refuge to avoid starving to death, and a recreational space to complain about their bad luck.
There are those who see the proliferation of public offices with lights on and hallways crowded with unattended citizens as a flaw in institutional design.
What a mistake in perspective!
Seen through the benevolence of local sociology and the realism of sheltering offices, massive public employment is not a problem: it is the most complex, costly, and sophisticated charitable undertaking in the West.
If the local private sector had the audacity to compete in open markets, pay first-world salaries, and demand real levels of productivity, it would leave thousands of citizens exposed to the absolute harshness of entrepreneurial daring.
Fortunately, there is the State, that tender and benevolent heart which, faithful to Alberto Benegas Lynch’s diagnosis, decides to intervene precisely where reality becomes unpleasantly competitive.

Charity with Other People’s Money

The syllogism is perfect in its perversity.
Let us suffocate the productive sector with a regulatory structure worthy of aerospace engineering and a tax system that confiscates even the desire to undertake.
Once we have succeeded in making the opening of an SME a high-risk sport, with more inspectors than customers, let us proudly proclaim that the private market “does not generate quality jobs.”
This is where the genius of the bureaucratic patch enters.
As Ignacio Munyo rightly warns when examining the rigidities and productivity gaps in our economy, paradoxically, the systemic inability to grow is solved… by hiring more people to move papers no one reads, and stamps that refer to another yawning bureaucrat.
Why reform labor laws, deregulate the economy, or modernize education if the public budget can be used as a gigantic social sedative?

The Art of Not Being Held Accountable

In the private sector, an inefficient employee is a human cost problem; in the realm of protected public employment, it is an acquired right.
As Ludwig von Mises taught, in the absence of a price system or a profit-and-loss balance, the state administration operates in a cheerful parallel quantum dimension, where merit is a dirty word and idleness is rewarded with seniority.
After all, who needs decent wages generated by the genuine creation of value when one can have a guaranteed salary at the end of the month, financed by taxes on the captive worker who gets up early every day?
The massive civil service thus becomes the consolation prize of a society that has renounced excellence and prefers the peace of administrative graveyards to the growth that every Minister of Economy takes it upon himself to justify from the wrong place.

Conclusion: All Bureaucrats, Happy and Poor

At the end of the day, maintaining this monumental army of redundancy is an act of profound poetic justice.
If we cannot aspire to be a rich, modern, and competitive country, at least let us all become public employees in some imaginary agency; or our subordinate representatives will create it immediately.
Addicted to other people’s taxes, we sustain with applause a structure that shelters us in exchange for our economic freedom.
A masterpiece of survival: the State takes your money by forcing it through the banking system, sets burdens that are impossible to sustain, ruins the business before it opens its doors, forbids you from competing… and then hires more public officials so that you applaud it and thank it for its benevolence toward the unemployed, useless “comrade,” from behind a desk.
Who can offer more?

Mass public employment
Inefficiency and productivity
State intervention

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