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Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

Most Americans care about creating American jobs in the private sector not about growing the government by creating more government jobs. More Americans are employed by industry and small businesses (as it should be) than by government.

Why would you think there needs to be one giant employer instead of a healthy market of many?

Stats:

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics puts the total number of Americans employed by government (at any level, federal, state, local, or military) at roughly 23 million, as of Feb 2025. At the same time, private businesses employ roughly 132 million Americans, vastly outstripping the employment of the government.

This is what you want. More teachers than administrators. More private employment than tax-supported services. We need government. We need good and effective bureaucrats, even. But we should always be cautious about the economic friction that increases in the government sector usually cause.

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>More Americans are employed by industry and small businesses (as it should be) than by government.

sure, millions of businesses if you divide it that way. Meanwhile the government is still the largest single employer in the us. Wal-Mart's global market, by comparison (the largest private market in the US) is 2.1m.

>Why would you think there needs to be one giant employer instead of a healthy market of many?

Why is Google bigger than a startup? They deal with more money and people. The government isn't running like a business but is still running on a scale of managing trillions of dollars and caring for hundreds of millions of americans. Why wouldn't our government be large?

Also, private sector hasn't exactly been stable the last 15 years if you're a normal worker. That's pretty much the one advantadge of public sector until employers can't throw out employees like livestock whenever they fancy. People claim to want more teachers but treat them horribly.

> Most Americans care about creating American jobs in the private sector not about growing the government by creating more government jobs. More Americans are employed by industry and small businesses (as it should be) than by government.

Honestly, as a recovering libertarian, I'm actually pretty enthusiastic about creating government-run services. I'd like to see far more of them, and thus far more people employed by government. For instance: I'd much rather use a weather app put out by NOAA (if only such a thing existed) than any of the private alternatives (whose business model is really to secretly invade your privacy and sell your data).

> Why would you think there needs to be one giant employer instead of a healthy market of many?

"One giant employer" is a ridiculous straw-man, but I've come to realize the market isn't a panacea. And the "optimal market solution" can actually be pretty user/customer/worker hostile.

I actually work at a private business that could plausibly be a government-run service, and I think it'd actually be pretty good for everyone if it were converted into one (so long as the government is not run by anyone with a last name of Musk).

> I'd much rather use a weather app put out by NOAA (if only such a thing existed) Why not put relevant links to weather.gov on your homescreen or in your browser bookmarks?

> Why not put relevant links to weather.gov on your homescreen or in your browser bookmarks?

That's exactly what I ended up doing. But it's a little awkward because I have a bookmark to my zip code's forecast page. An app would be nicer and more accessible to more users.

> Why not put relevant links to weather.gov on your homescreen or in your browser bookmarks?

That's exactly what I ended up doing.

Some segment of the population wants more teachers, but is not willing to pay them more to attract them, because taxes would have to increase. Over 1k school districts in the US are on a four day week, as it’s the only way to retain those teachers on the budget they have. Americans want more private employment. Where? If healthcare and construction, where demand is greatest, do they think laid off government workers will retrain? Or retire? The last administration attempted to create well paying, union jobs in clean energy technology manufacturing and this admin is rolling all of that funding back (much to the detriment of red states, to their self inflicted surprise). The economy is at 4% unemployment, and 4M Boomers are retiring per year, ~11,200 per day.

If this is an attempt to free up labor for private industry to further diminish worker power and wages, the demographics crunch comes regardless due to the compressing working age population pyramid. The federal government creates jobs for both unprofitable yet necessary work and is an employer of last resort in the ways it offers and structures work available (military spouse flexible work arrangements, locating offices and working spaces for federal work in communities where no other employer will offer jobs, etc).

The American electorate, broadly speaking, is grossly uneducated and unsophisticated in these matters unfortunately. They don’t even know who pays tariffs, why they’re inflationary, etc.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/14/politics/the-biggest-predicto...

I didn’t realize TSMC, Intel, GlobalFoundry, Micron etc were owned by the government.

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