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Comment by Klinky | Hacker News Reader

>In Government, headcount is a (political, organization, etc.) benefit.

Can be said for the private sector as well. Unless you think the private sector is growth averse.

>In industry it is a cost.

Governmental employees are not free.

You also made other points as well such as the #1 goal of the Space Shuttle program was to keep bureaucrats employed & that the private sector is more efficient regarding the value it creates per employee.

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I've never seen a corporation with "full employment" as an actual, stated, strategic goal.

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/welfare-reform/legislation-and-...

"Building Britain’s Recovery: Achieving Full Employment", published on 15 December 2009, restates the Government’s response to the recession and signals the start of the programme to return to full employment.

What is your point? I am not seeing the problem with a government having a national employment goal & I am not shocked to find that private industry has no interest in making a national employment goal.

But you see businesses aiming for improved productivity all the time. A desire for full employment is just the national version of that. It's not like a country can easily or ethically fire or cut adrift swathes of its citizenry at once.

Not really. Let me give you an example. In the 1980s, it was costing £70/ton to mine coal worth £40/ton. Labour party policy was that jobs for their supporters were more important than creating wealth for the whole country. In the end, raw economics forced a resolution - the country couldn't afford to double everyone's energy bill just to score some ideological points.

Sure, but you could find similar examples of companies extracting economic rents to benefit their shareholders until they were disrupted by a more agile competitor. My underlying point is that citizens are more like shareholders than employees, you can't just fire them because you don't like their demands. Governments are instituted to secure the interests of theri citizens, who then compete among themselves for control of institutions.

It wasn't raw economics, it was politics. Thatcher saw that the miners helped bring down the Heath government, saw an opportunity to break the unions and consolidate her power. (Creating the insane social and economical inequalities in the UK today)

Now we rely on buying gas from Russia while spending £25Bn on Trident to protect us from Russia.

Thatcher's anti-union stance & unwillingness to negotiate with the coal union when on strike eventually lead to the industry's demise. If your view was that domestic UK coal production was a waste of money, then you can thank the Thatcher run government for shutting it down. Government can do good & bad depending on where you stand.

If Scargill had said "give us the means of production and we will demonstrate the superiority of collective ownership" then that would be one thing. The mines were costing twice as much to run as they were worth; the unions could have "bought" them for one pound! But that's not what happened. He said "just give us money". It's impossible to negotiate like that.

Incidentally, I never understood why Thatcher was evil for not subsidizing the loss-making mines, and modern politicians are evil for subsidizing loss-making banks (i.e. RBS).

I do not think there could have been any way to make the industry profitable on the open market. Subsidies from surrounding governments were much higher for their domestic coal than the UK was willing to pay for theirs. Cheaper easily mined coal imports from Australia, Russia, South Africa along with North Sea oil & gas flooded alternatives on to the market. The fact that the assets were privatized and sold off later, yet the UK coal industry remained mainly dead along with the "green movement" probably shows that the industry could not have survived on it's own without the subsidies.

Some view Thatcher destroyed the industry not only because it was unprofitable but also as an attack against the unions, supposedly going so far as to shutdown even profitable mines or those that had potential. Putting 180,000+ out of work is going to cause some outrage from those you are putting out of work & the surrounding communities that relied on those wages. Also some may view domestic energy production as a valuable asset to retain even if it is not market viable just due to energy security/independence concerns.

As far as the bank comparison, I think some people have a kinder view towards the plight of a coal miner working in dangerous conditions for not a lot of pay vs the plight of an executive banker raking in massive bonuses while tanking the economy.

A company is an OPEN system (they can cut jobs and make more money), but a country is a (mostly) CLOSED system (someones spending is somebody else's income). Even the most ineffectual government employee is more valuable than another mother or father on the dole when unemployment is already high.

I'm not supporting government waste, but the way. Efficiency should be the goal, but you obviously have NO idea what you are talking about.

"Even the most ineffectual government employee is more valuable than another mother or father on the dole when unemployment is already high."

That would suggest that the solution for unemployment is to simply give all unemployed people public sector jobs - which doesn't sound like a very good idea to me.

It's a plausible (temporary) solution, known as the "employer of last resort". It worked okay in the 1930s; even today, a lot of the national-parks infrastructure is stuff that was built in that era, because instead of just handing out welfare payments, the government hired people on short-term contracts instead. Same stimulus/welfare effect (people who can't find other work are paid for a few months), but the national parks got some useful work out of the deal too.

"It worked okay in the 1930s; even today"

It's a mixed bag. Some economists claimed it helped others claim it lengthened and made the recession deeper.

And it is good for people. Being unemployed is very unhealthy for your mind for a lot of people.

The UK govt tried this recently; those given work placements immediately began crying that working for the dole violated their "human rights".

- They were forced (or tricked, or coerced) into working for private companies. We're talking about jobs in supermarkets and (the UK equivalent of) dollar stores.

- The taxpayer paid the wage (the same as jobseeker's allowance, I think). The private companies didn't pay anything.

- Companies could just sack their workers and enjoy the benefits of free labour.

So much for the minimum wage! How can minimum-wage workers compete with free labour? (Free from the company's perspective, that is.) And this was supposed to reduce unemployment?!

And anyway, if people are working, why aren't they getting minimum wage?

> Even the most ineffectual government employee is more valuable than another mother or father on the dole when unemployment is already high.

Yeah, it worked very well in Russia and East Germany. So well people were risking their lives to go somewhere else for better opportunities. And if North-Koreans could get out of their country, I'm sure they would be happy witnesses of a full-employment state policy.

You obviously have NO idea what you are talking about.

Could it be that they risked their lives because they lived under a totalitarian regime? People didn't leave because they didn't make enough money.

If you think matters of economics were the only, or primary, reason why people attempted to escape from those countries, you are seriously delusional.

It all goes together, my friend. WHen you destroy the economy, you have to replace it by a state-fueled economy and therefore the totalitarian package goes with it. We have yet to see totalitarian states with free economy. It does not exist because it goes against its own logic. That's not hard to understand.

The most successful economies are not free and feature heavy governmental influence. One of the most successful, China, could be considered a totalitarian regime.

That's because a corporation does not have to commit to a certain level of production. On the other hand, the government does so all the time at the request of the people. And when you guarantee output X for whatever good/service, the notion of full employment makes sense. As a representative example, it takes about 5,000 police officers to keep the peace for 1,000,000 people in an urban environment (rough estimate, just an example).

Of course, what goods/services should be guaranteed and what the value of X should be for each one is and will remain an open problem.

> >In Government, headcount is a (political, organization, etc.) benefit.

>> Can be said for the private sector as well. Unless you think the private sector is growth averse.

Huh? Employees aren't growth. Employees may be necessary to accomplish/support growth, but that's very different. The difference is that a biz will happily take growth with no employees and will try to avoid employees with no growth.

Employees are often a sign of growth, though not always. A large employee count often means the company has experienced significant growth and is relatively stable. Even a small company, hiring your first employee means you're probably experiencing growth or see the opportunity for it.

Of course judging a company based only on it's headcount is silly, just like judging that the government must be wasteful and inefficient because of it's headcount.

Headcounts are a common metric of importance in business, though not the only one. Especially for managers, the phrase "grew the organization from [x] to [y]" is often denominated in units of employees (take a look at google hits for "grew the organization from"). So managers typically have an incentive to increase headcount.

> Headcounts are a common metric of importance in business

Unless you're claiming that everything import is growth....

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