The news today describes the withdrawal of Bill Richardson from the job of Secretary of Commerce. None of the articles point out that the guy has never had a job outside of government (wikipedia). Does it make sense to have someone running Commerce who has never had any experience of trying to do any sort of business? As private industry continues to shed jobs and government continues to grow, one might argue that in the long run all U.S. jobs will be government or government contracting, but we’re not there yet. As a taxpayer, I get a bit nervous when I see the entire government run by people who’ve never been net payers of taxes (of course government workers do pay income tax, but their tax-funded salaries are larger than their tax payments, so on balance they are net recipients of tax dollars).
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This kind of analysis is called a Calhounian class analysis (dividing the population into tax consumers and tax producers). See for instance http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/04/scion_of_tax_co.html