The one good thing about public spending is information on it is easily accessible. You’re usually a google search away from finding out most of the State’s horrible little spending secrets, at least at the local level. After reading about the Stockton CA bankruptcy I decided to take a look at what public school teachers make in my area. I prepared myself for absurdities, but was still surprised at what I found.  There were many outrages, like at least 20 assistance principles making almost 100k a year. But the one that really ripped me up the most was the elementary school art teacher who made $70k. Really?  70 thousand dollars a “year” (most teachers around here get paid for 9 months of “work”) to watch children finger paint? I would love to hear someone make any kind of rational argument as to why this is acceptable, but more importantly sustainable. Hey, I love art. I think it’s great that children are exposed to it in school. But let’s be honest. All the teacher is really doing in an elementary school art class and making sure the children don’t eat paste or sniff magic markers. This could easily be accomplished with a part time teenager making $8 an hour. Of course the yearly salary is the least of our worries. After 20 years on the job she’ll be able to retire with 80% of her highest yearly salary, and be paid til the day she dies. I know plenty of school teachers who retired before the age of 60. So let’s say our teacher maxes out at $70k, retires at 59 and dies when she’s 83. That’s 24 years making $56K a year for a grand total of $1,416,000. This doesn’t include health care benefits. Not a bad trade for a few hundred macaroni glued crafts, and there are a thousand of other cases just like this in my city alone.

In another of example of the full retardification of public spending, I was watching the police state propaganda program Boston’s Finest. For those who’ve not seen it, it’s pretty much a high production episode of Cops set in Boston. In this episode the cops are down at headquarters, planning a raid on a local drug dealer who is rumored to possess a firearm. The cops draw up their plan, which includes, among other things, 70 police officers. That’s right, 7-0. The cops, a majority of whom are dressed in full darth vader costume, pile into a parades worth of armored vehicles and swoop in on the pusher. The 70 deep crew storms the house to find one sleeping slob, a single loaded 6 shooter and a handful of crack rocks. The raid was a great success by law enforcement’s lowly standards, but an abysmal failure by even the loosest economic one. A quick, hyper-conservative estimate puts this raid at about $10k, but it’s more likely close to triple that. Even so, let’s say $10k. For what? Ten thousand dollars to get one bozo, a gun, 6 bullets and a half hour worth of crack off the street? How could anyone justify this as necessary?  I bet you could have hired a customer service associate to call the drug dealer and offer him $500 bucks for the gun and the crack, and if you were hellbent on arresting him, you could have pulled him over on the way to collect his money.

Sadly, the State, its workers and its legions of unawakened followers believe they live in a world unrestrained by economics. The examples above are not only wasteful in terms of money, but in social usefulness, which may be the biggest shame of all. We can deal with wasted money, but when a huge number of people exert a lifetime of useless effort, eventually we find ourselves living in, well, what we live in now. A country with a tiny productive economy. A stagnant, slumping society where very few have their needs met above the base of the hierarchy.  Some day the slump will result in a collapse and many of these faux-economic actors will be shown the full extent of their non-production. You can only shelter yourself from the markets for so long. Soon you will be sniffed out and made to participate in reality. Perhaps you can still teach children to paint, but you will no longer have the force of the State to secure your ludicrously inflated wages.