Public vs. Private Sector

Here is some food for thought as further proof of the socialist dysfunctionality of Canada under Justin Trudeau, even if, we must admit, the bloating of the wealth-consuming public sector, at the expense of the wealth-producing private sector, predates his reckless insouciance, all the way back to the Trudeau Sr. And the precarious imbalance is only getting worse – much worse, it seems:

As Pope Leo XIII said, in his 1891 landmark encyclical, Rerum Novarum, it is by the labour of working men that states grow rich, not by the expansion of bureaucracies and well-recompensed white-collar ‘executives’.

We may apply this also to Pope Saint John Paul II’s warning from par. 48 from his own 1991 social encyclical, Centesimus Annus, on the hundredth anniversary of Rerum:

In recent years the range of such intervention has vastly expanded, to the point of creating a new type of state, the so-called “Welfare State.” This has happened in some countries in order to respond better to many needs and demands, by remedying forms of poverty and deprivation unworthy of the human person. However, excesses and abuses, especially in recent years, have provoked very harsh criticisms of the Welfare State, dubbed the “Social Assistance State.” Malfunctions and defects in the Social Assistance State are the result of an inadequate understanding of the tasks proper to the State. Here again the principle of subsidiarity must be respected: a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.[100]

By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbors to those in need. It should be added that certain kinds of demands often call for a response which is not simply material but which is capable of perceiving the deeper human need.

Indeed. +