At some point, Americans may come to the realization that the private sector cannot produce jobs in the numbers that are needed for a growing population. Too many people for too few private-sector jobs. To date, nobody of any consequence has been willing to touch this subject.
The political implications and the necessary denial of current national myths about the magic of the market place are too much to bear. I imagine that some dipsomaniacal economics professor at a third-rate college is writing about this dilemma, but our national psyche isn’t ready to deal with it.
It is an interesting fact that Virgin Islanders arrived at this conclusion long ago. They understood that, given their circumstances, private-sector employment was too cyclical and undependable. The result was the current economic structure, with government spending and public employment as critical “drivers.”
On a certain level, Virgin Islanders should be thankful that the territory is small and far away. If it were bigger, the political right could make “an example” of it as a sinkhole of waste, inefficiency and corruption. And if I were a lawyer, I would rather be on the prosecution than the defense.
There is a fundamental question: How do you keep a big public sector from becoming an unproductive jobs program with low standards and entrenched negative norms and values? In a sense, this is the dilemma of modern socialism, and nobody has come up with a good answer. Certainly not the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The experience of the last 40 years represents a significant missed opportunity. Given the scale of government, the territory should be a Caribbean version of Singapore. Efficient, clean, well-maintained, well-educated, safe. It is not.
This failure of government—and the people in it—to work to a high, or even a medium standard, is a breakdown on at least four levels. First, it has cheated Virgin Islanders out of the services that they deserve and have paid for. Second, it has damaged the image of the territory. Third, it has spawned a culture whose qualities are low standards, indifference, and a sense of entitlement to not work, but to get paid. And, finally, it has failed to provide what could have been a model for meeting a challenge that the whole country will face in the future.
Why did this happen? A mini-case study. Joe is a screw-up. He deserves to be fired. But we can’t fire him because it is almost impossible and because poor Joe won’t be able to find another job. Over time, Joe begins to set the standard. Others ask, either openly or to themselves, why should I work if he’s not? Lateness, absenteeism, poor performance are Joe’s signature. Everyone gets used to them, often by imitating them. And, because there are no consequences, at some point they become the culture. That is the fix that the territory – along with a lot of other places, like Greece – find itself in.
Part of the culture is the assumption that this can go on forever, that there will be no day of reckoning. That, as the Wall Street genius said, “We’ll keep dancing until the music stops.” As we have recently learned, at some point the music does stop, and the chickens come home to roost. And because everyone believed that the problem could be put off until a later day and simply “kicked the can down the road,” the landing is very hard indeed.
Bad assumptions are a very dangerous thing, and just because a lot of people are making them does not mean that they are any less dangerous—Or the people making them any less delusional. The best example of another huge shoe to drop is underfunded public pension systems, the can that has been kicked down the road so many times that the scale of the problem is almost unimaginable. The fact that GERS may not be much worse than many of the others should not give anyone comfort. The music does stop.
Grade: D If the problem weren’t so difficult, and if the deJongh Administration weren’t making the first real effort in this area in decades, this grade would be an F.
