It isn’t just government, Gram – it is *huge* private enterprise stuff. Division of labor is a wonderful thing for everyone, Gram3: It is *not* about what is valuable or what is essential but rather a matter of how economies work, and economies are nothing more than the aggregation of individual decisions. It should be viewed as a capital investment rather than an expenditure, if that makes any sense.īeyond that, we are getting into the weeds with economics. WRT the Hoover Dam, it could not be done without the federal government for a number of reasons. It is a way of classifying sectors of the economy and what the entails. This isn’t a discussion about what is valuable or what is better. I would argue that there is a difference between people producing products and getting a government paycheck *for a limited time* and an employee who is not producing a product *even though they are essential* to our society. Overhead is not bad, but beyond a certain point, the enterprise cannot support more overhead. So, the CEO of a company is overhead to the company but his job is essential. Saying that a public sector job is overhead is not saying that it is not valuable to the enterprise or even essential to the enterprise. We are not talking about the same thing in the same way.
