My latest blast on the disparity in compensations between the public and private sectors drew a counter-blast from a private-sector friend:

John,
The portion of that report that jumps off the page for me is this one:
“The unfunded liability for Social Security is $17.5 trillion in 2009, according to a 2009 National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) brief. What’s more, Medicare Part A is underfunded by $36.7 trillion, Part B by $37.0 trillion and Part D by $15.6 trillion, bringing the total unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare to some $106.8 trillion!”
We will NEVER pay that money. NEVER. Nor will we be paying the vast majority of the unfunded pension liabilities that have been promised to all those soon to retire government workers. Only the most delusional could possibly believe that we ever will. In fact, the only reason things aren’t falling apart more rapidly than they already are is because there are a great many people out there who are simply suspending disbelief and saying things like “I don’t know how precisely but I think we’ll find a way to muddle through a little bit longer somehow.” Personally I find that laughably optimistic.
In the meantime, intelligent educated men like you are telling your kids to get a government job, but I say that’s a big mistake. Whatever they learn to do it had better be something that has a very clear and definable value-added for society. Teach them to fix manufacturing robots. Teach them plastics engineering. Teach them medicine or radiology or fixing jet engines. Because long before they get a chance to collect those generous government pensions there will be a huge backlash. And in that backlash, the most they’ll be able to hope for is to end up broke and alive after a lifetime of bureaucratic drudgery. I’m guessing that many of their peers in the government won’t get off as easy.
I’m sure I’m ahead of the curve with this idea … But it’s a fantasy to believe that all those completely unproductive people are going to able to make slaves of all the productive people. A few of them, those that are retiring now, will do great. Later, many of them will do poorly, and by the time our kids are retiring, there will be no generous benefits for anyone. Then they’ll have no useful skills and a market that values a bureaucrat’s contribution at zero.
Whatever you do — DON’T LET THEM WORK FOR THE GOVERNMENT!

[Me] Well, that’s a nice ray of optimism in the gathering gloom. Is it really, though, “a fantasy to believe that all those completely unproductive people are going to able to make slaves of all the productive people.” Like, such arrangements are unknown to human history?

To the contrary, the overwhelming majority of human beings that have ever lived in organized societies have been enslaved to unproductive bureaucracies: see under “Imperial China,” “Roman Empire,” “Sassanids,” “Moguls,” “Ottomans,” “Dynastic Egypt,” “Tsarism,” “Communism,” “Spanish-American Empire,” etc., etc., etc., etc. See Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism; see Wesson’s The Imperial Order; see Shafarevich’s The Socialist Phenomenon, etc., etc., etc.

Taking human history as a whole, liberty, consensual government, and rational economics are freakish and momentary aberrations. The government people will outwit them at last. They have five thousand years’ experience.