But, you never actually make any real evidence based case for why this is a bad thing for the country. You just state as fact the conservative mindset. What evidence do you have that wealthy people living near DC is bad? What sequence of events can you envision that hurts Americans as a whole as a result of this fact? You don’t lay any of that out.

It’s not bad, per se. Many government contractors in the DC area are engineers or high level IT employees like sysadmins and DBAs. These people are actually cheaper to hire on a need-by-need basis because the federal government will never have to pay them any benefits or pension. Additionally, you wouldn’t want most engineers to ever be federal employees because they would entertain themselves with finding new, cool ideas to work on, and you would have budgetary chaos from that.

What actually hurts the public is that the federal government’s labor management policies are based on either outdated or unrealistic assumptions. One of those is the notion of protecting civil servants from politics. You can’t do that. I can guarantee you that if a CIA analyst had stuck to their guns and refused to tell Cheney what he wanted to hear, they would have been fired one way or another (given such shitty work that they’d leave for Starbucks and McDonalds). Go to an at-will system like corporate America, so the dead wood can be kicked out, and there is less of an assumption that the federal government is where people go when they’re too lazy to work an honest job, but too proud to just take a welfare check.

Radley Balko is a senior editor for Reason magazine and publishes a weblog at TheAgigator.com.

First, as the article points out, western counties are bigger geographically than their eastern counterparts. I’d expect to see a larger variance in average wealth among a set of small sized counties than large ones. The smaller a county, the less likely that it will be diverse economically, the more likely that it will be an outlier. DC is disproportionately represented, so is New York. So what?

Second, the DC metro area, IIRC, is the third largest metropolitan area in the country. Given that wealthy counties in general are centered around urban areas, one should expect to see a large number of wealthy counties around DC.

Finally, the claim that “Washington Metro area doesn’t actually produce anything”, is ludicrous and provably false. You exempt the tech corridor, but there are tons of other organizations in the area that produce plenty: Sprint, Gannet, Washington Post, Cap One, Conventry Health Care, Harman Manufacturing, Marriott, the Carlyle Group; we could go on all day here, without even getting into the large employers that are direct beneficiaries of the federal government, like Lockheed and General Dynamics.

To be certain, DC benefits economically from being the seat of the federal government. Most capital cities do. However, this condition alone is not an indicator that DC metro residents are lapping up taxpayer dollars and producing nothing of value in return. Radley, do you believe that your work at the Cato institute (located at 1000 Mass Ave, DC) amounts to nothing more than paying “lawyers to procure money the government has forcibly taken from taxpayers”? I don’t.

I think it’s valid and important to criticize the federal government for waste, inefficiency, and growth. But to say that the 5 million souls who inhabit the DC region are guilty of the same? Well, it’s just BS. Try telling that to a software engineer at AOL or a marketing analyst at Marriott. Usually, your Fox articles are an oasis of intellectual honesty, but this one sounds like an editor asked you to fan the flames of the culture wars, and you happily obliged. (Those city folks! They’re taking our money!)

But, you never actually make any real evidence based case for why this is a bad thing for the country. You just state as fact the conservative mindset. What evidence do you have that wealthy people living near DC is bad? What sequence of events can you envision that hurts Americans as a whole as a result of this fact? You don’t lay any of that out.

In short, what’s your reasoning?

I sometimes wonder what incentive future generations are going to have to be productive knowing that the proceeds of that productivity were already consumed before they were born. It’s like showing up at the bar after the party has ended, just to be stuck with the tab for all the shit-faced drunks who left just as you arrived.

There’s still some here, but not what it was, and nothing on CA/MA/Research Triangle…

Though in their defense, Howard and Frederick Counties have a lot of (legitimate) high-tech industry that produces stuff, and
I wouldn’t be surprised if the new Baltimore biotech centers start running rings around MoCo soon.

Don’t take this the wrong way but anecdotally I’ve noticed that people who aren’t in the true private sector and are transplants to the DC area assume that everyone is tied to the government somehow in greater DC. Its not true. The Greater Washington economy is much more diverse then one would think.

Another industry inside the district limit would be education. GW, Georgetown, Howard aren’t just universities either. They all run massive hospitals and research facilities. For a bonus tack on American, CUA, and Gallaudet, all in the district limits.

But Point taken, its not without merit. But there are many of us here who have NOTHING to do with the government, even on a once or twice removed level. The statement “the only major industry is government” isn’t really any more true then saying the only industry Chicago has is meat packing.

It would seem that the mindset of those in D.C. has trickled down into those of Fairfax.

But, yeah, in general, this whole region produces nothing but red tape. And takes an increasingly larger cut of the take as it does so.

If you want to cut back on the federal contractors and the money spent on them, a few things will need to be done:

1) Federal employment for civilians will need to be at-will so government managers can fire employees for the same behavior that their private sector counterparts can fire them.

2) Hire more background investigators so that DoD and DoJ can process more security clearances, more quickly. This will make it easier for people to get into the currently high-paying positions, which will lower the wages of the contract labor force.

3) Increase accountability on the government side. Just look at the FBI’s major failures like Virtual Case File. Currently, there is little potential for punishment for federal employees who mismanage their end of the contract, even in cases where the federal contractor is actually giving them dire warnings that the government’s direction amount to suicide for the project.

I know a few well paid feds, but most of us traded higher wage potential in the private sector for the stability of federal jobs. I could have made probably 10-15K more as a contractor, but I’d probably be out of a job right now with the down turn, if my office is any indication. From a libertarian standpoint that might be a perverse incentive, but from an individual standpoint I’ll take stability over higher wages the majority of the time.