“Workers across the country responded with anger and confusion,” the Associated Press reported last week, in response to the Trump administration’s layoffs of probationary workers. CBS News tells us “federal workers express shock, anger over mass firings,” and The New York Times writes that federal works face “sleeplessness, anger and tears.”
Some workers launched lawsuits against the Trump administration. Others went on legacy media television shows to claim they have been mistreated.
The media interviews, lawsuits, protests, and open letters all hit on a similar theme: that it is wrong and unfair that taxpayer-funded government workers might have to look for work in the marketplace like ordinary people. Regular workers, after all—the type without federal jobs from which, historically, it is virtually impossible to be fired—often have to change jobs whenever there is a restructuring, merger, bankruptcy, or budget cut. This is life outside the comfortable fantasy world of federal employment. Naturally, federal employees don’t like the sound of that at all.
The legacy media has portrayed this all as a conflict between the hard-working, guileless folk of the federal workforce on the one hand, and the insensitive villains of the Trump administration on the other. There is a third party to all of this that is virtually never mentioned by the media, though: the taxpayers who pay for it all.
The Forgotten Third Party: The Taxpayers
After all, the federal employees’ salaries only exist because money is transferred—by force—from taxpayers to federal employees. If a taxpayer doesn’t want to pay for USAID’s countless leftwing propaganda programs across the globe, then he has no choice. He has to pay up or go to jail for tax evasion.
Thus, any discussion of federal employees that doesn’t mention the taxpayers who pay bureaucrats’ salaries is fundamentally dishonest and incomplete. Donald Trump isn’t paying for these jobs. American fast-food workers, insurance agents, and cell-phone salespeople are paying for it all.
Indeed, in America, there are more than ten million jobs funded by federal taxes, including direct-hire federal employees, contractors, and grantees. These jobs are paid for by about 131 million private-sector workers. That’s one federal worker for every 13 private workers. Given that taxes on income are the primary source of federal revenue, each federal worker owes nearly everything to the 13 workers who pay for it. Federal workers also tend to enjoy salaries well above the national average, which means the people paying the bills are often people with lower salaries and fewer benefits than federal workers.
Federal workers and their defenders have a ready response to this. They insist that all federal jobs are absolutely essential and the taxpayers are getting a bargain for the money they are forced to pay into federal salaries. Do the taxpayers agree? An easy way to find out would be to give the taxpayers a choice to keep the money they pay toward federal salaries. If the taxpayers think they’re getting a great deal, I’m sure they’ll be happy to voluntarily keep paying. For instance, we could ask the mom of 3 who works the drive thru at Burger King if she wants to keep paying for the USAID grants manager who is paid $120,000 to work from home. Naturally, we would helpfully explain to the drive-thru worker that without this USAID worker, there might not be any new transgender operas in Colombia next year. To make things easier, we could even include a checkable box on tax returns to the effect of “yes, tax me to pay for the FBI agents who will investigate me for criticizing the local school board.”
If we think the answer might be “no” to all this, then this illustrates a fundamental problem with forcing private-sector workers to pay all those federal salaries.
Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory
We have a word for this relationship between the federal workers and the taxpayers. The word is “exploitation.” Another term for it all might be “class conflict.” Whatever we call it, the relationship is this: the state with all its coercive power extracts money from one group of people and hands it over to another group of people. In this relationship, the government class exploits the private-sector class. In a larger sense, this describes the relationship overall between the state and the taxpayers who pay for it.
The Marxists were right that class warfare exists, but they were wrong about the nature of the classes. The conflict is not between the capitalists and the workers. The conflict is between the productive taxpayer class which pays for everything, and the parasite class which exploits the productive class.
Indeed, contrary to a myth often spread by conservatives, it was not the Marxists who invented the idea of class conflict or class warfare. It was, rather, the laissez-faire liberals—aka “classical liberals” or “libertarians”—who pioneered the idea. It’s easy to see why. The liberals understood that market production is based on voluntary exchange. In the marketplace, no one is forced to pay for what he does not want. The old liberals identified the market classes as the business owners, the private-sector laborers, and all who were net taxpayers and whose income came by free commerce.
[Read More: “Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Classes“ by Ralph Raico]
There were other classes, too, though. These were the nonmarket classes who relied on government salaries, government contracts, and government subsidies for income. By the nineteenth century, the liberals already had it mapped out: the market classes were the exploited. The government classes were the parasites.
Or, as historian Ralph Raico put it, this a conflict in which it is “the ‘tax-eating’ versus the ‘tax-paying’ class.”
Nonetheless, the media narrative on this has consistently been that it is the tax-eating class that is the victim here. They are the victims of Trump, or of Elon Musk, or whatever public figure can serve as the nemesis to the presumably selfless “public servants.” The taxpayer, through it all, usually remains invisible.
Fortunately, the same media narrative convinces us that we need not be too concerned about the workers who have been let go. We have been told for years that federal employees are the cream of the crop: exceptionally competent, hard-working, highly educated, dedicated servants of the public interest. If this is the case, then these laid off workers will have no trouble finding new jobs very soon.
