If we really want to get the most “bang for our buck,” in terms of minimizing resource and energy usage, and be of more benefit to our environment, while simultaneously maximizing our wealth-creation and prosperity, we’ll minimize the portion of our GDP that comes from government, and maximize the portion of our GDP that comes from the private sector, that is, the private, for-profit portion of our economy.
Producing Wealth
Question: What is prosperity if not a high level of wealth? And what is wealth but an accumulation of things of value? If that’s the case, wouldn’t that mean that we can, as a nation, maximize our collective wealth and our collective prosperity by maximizing how many things of value are created rather than minimize them? I would certainly think so.
Think about this: it is the private sector that produces goods and services that are deemed to have value. All those things of value add up and are considered wealth. The public sector, that is, government services, don’t actually produce anything of value that can be referred to as wealth. One government bureaucrat that switches to working in the private sector now produces things (goods and services) that have value, which means wealth now being created that wasn’t being created before, and which now contributes to our collective prosperity, when before he or she wasn’t producing anything of value at all, and was in a position, working for a bureaucracy, that most likely was a burden to the wealth-creating, prosperity-increasing private portion of the economy.
If the government shrank, and millions of people left government jobs, where they weren’t producing anything that could be deemed as wealth, and entered the private sector, where they were producing things that had value, wouldn’t that help increase our nation’s GDP, thus increasing the collective level of wealth and prosperity found in this country?
In other words, like I already said, maximizing the private, wealth-creating sector of the economy, and minimizing the public, non-wealth-creating sector of the economy, maximizes our wealth and prosperity as a nation. It gives you the “most bang for your buck.”
How the Private Sector Reduces Environmental Strains
If you read my article, Big Government is Bad for the Environment, I talked about how government bureaucracies are always trying to be inefficient and wasteful in order to get more money allocated to them by the government. In fact, I’ve talked about this problem in other articles, too. Those bureaucracies are already wasteful with our resources as it is, and are always trying to be even more wasteful to get more money allocated to them.
Compare that to the private sector, where for-profit businesses are trying to compete against each other for more market share in order to make more profits.
And how do they do this? Like I’ve said in other articles, they tend to do it in three different ways. They try to give customers a higher-quality product or service for the same price as their competitors. Or, they try to have the same product, but for a lower price. Or, they get innovative and try to develop a new product or service that none of their competitors have, which drives technology forward.
These three things are great. They’re inherently pro-people, as opposed to government bureaucracies that are inherently anti-people with their inefficiency and wastefulness and bad customer service and what-not. But there is another thing private, competitive, for-profit businesses do to try to make more profits, a fourth thing, one that is good for the environment and usage of our resources, and that is that they try to reduce their costs in producing those goods and services, in order to save money and make more of a profit.
For example, a soft drink company figuring out how to use less aluminum in their drink cans is an example of this principal. A consultation business that works with manufacturing firms to help them find out where they are wasting energy, and replace old equipment with new, high-efficiency equipment that does the same job with much less energy, so they can save money and increase their profits, is another example of this principal. A trucking company that installs devices in their cabs to keep track of how high RPM goes between shifts, and turns truck engines off after idling for three minutes, is another example of this principal. These are just a few of the multitude of examples for-profit businesses use to try to save money and maximize profits, which they do by trying to minimize their resource and energy usage, and thus reduce their environmental footprint. When a company is wasteful with its resources and energy usage, or throws away materials that it could turn into another product, it’s losing money and throwing away potential profits.
In Summary
In other words, private, competitive, for-profit businesses work to minimize their environmental footprint all while government bureaucracies are doing all they can to, in essence, maximize their environmental footprint. In other words, we can reduce our toll on the environment by maximizing the private sector and minimizing the public sector, that is, the sector that represents the government. And by doing that we simultaneously maximize the level of wealth and prosperity found being created in the nation.
