Seriously, you can take economic contrarianism too far.
Take a deep breath, forget all the rabbit holes you've been going down and go look at who governments actually hire, at what rates, and to do what. They're not recruiting civil servants or police or nurses or economists from the dole queue, or from people whose skillset is in imminent danger of being rendered obsolete by an algorithm. Just like the private sector, they have the remarkable ability to hire people that already have jobs or good job prospects by offering them more money (or more flexible work and better pensions, or a fancier title, or something that interests them more)
Government has exactly the same ability to hire people as the private sector (more actually; it has a broader revenue base, can offer more unique privileges and actually has near monopsony hiring power in many areas... and no, people don't train to become NHS healthcare practitioners because the local supermarket is replacing people with kiosks!) and does not need to create unemployment to be able to man its offices.
Quite the opposite actually, when unemployment shoots up governments in most developed countries have the obligation to pay lots of people unemployment benefits for , not working for them, and generally that's about the time it starts cutting the size of its own departments.
"Government has exactly the same ability to hire people as the private sector"
Yes, by paying more. What you're saying is that government should just be another market player.
Which causes inflation.
That's a fallacy of composition. Government is too big to do that.
There's nothing contrarian in what I'm saying. What I'm saying is look at it from the other point of view. If government increases the taxes on employers at a particular salary band then it will not be able to hire so many staff at that salary band. They will then take the government's shilling at the price on offer.
Which is how you solve the staffing problem in the NHS. By taxing the private healthcare providers at the relevant salary band until the NHS becomes fully staffed.
"more actually; it has a broader revenue base"
Government doesn't have a revenue base at all. Governments spend by printing money and tax by shredding money.
The little silver coins going into a big chest mental model isn't how it actually works. There are no little silver coins and there is no chest.
It's just debits and credits.
"when unemployment shoots up governments in most developed countries have the obligation to pay lots of people unemployment benefits for , not working"
Well there's a simple solution to that. Pay them to work instead. Backwards to what you are suggesting.
Which will then, remarkably, start acting as a spend-side auto stabiliser which means we can dispense with interest rate changes...
The NHS staffing problem is due to a lack of qualified staff seeking work in the country period. The government can't and doesn't attempt to solve that by levying arbitrarily high taxes on private provision. Even if the reason the government couldn't hire heart surgeons was because so many of them worked in private practice, taxing private practice out of existence wouldn't affect the demand for heart surgery being too high for the number of surgeons, it would just leave the government on the hook for providing all of it.
The reality is that government does attempt to keep tax base growth in line with spending growth where possible, and doesn't levy special employer NI contribution demands on heart surgeons. Because for all that the government attempting to broadly balance their budget over an economic cycle isn't exactly the same as coins in, coins out, it's not nearly as economically illiterate as 'the root causes of inflation is that productive employees haven't been forced into the public sector yet'. I mean, the poster child for high public sector employment on low wages and a government attitude that private enterprise is to be suppressed rather than milked as a revenue stream is Venezuela...
I also think that if you're determined to promote the kookier elements of the functional finance model, you should probably consider the possibility that people consider the idea that the true function of taxes is to force them to take government jobs at arbitrarily low wages to be evil as well as inaccurate. Apparently people don't hate interest rate changes so much they don't prefer the government abolishing the welfare state and actively targeting their jobs for elimination so they have no choice but to join a low-paid workfare programme!
"The NHS staffing problem is due to a lack of qualified staff seeking work in the country period. "
Correct, which is why preventing those with money from jumping the queue is so important. Then the queue is a priority queue based upon need not ability to pay.
There is no place for a 'Fast Track Queue' in the UK health system which serves nobody but the rich.
You can't have a 'market' except where there is excess capacity to supply.
You've very kindly explained why private medicine cannot exist.
"economically illiterate as 'the root causes of inflation is that productive employees haven't been forced into the public sector yet'"
Good job that's just a straw man then isn't it. Including the obligatory reference to Venezuela, Zimbabwe or Weimar just to demonstrate the comment is emotional rhetoric and belief rather than anything considered.
But of course it is far, far better I presume to give rich people free money in higher interest payments than to ensure poor people have jobs.
Take a deep breath, forget all the rabbit holes you've been going down and go look at who governments actually hire, at what rates, and to do what. They're not recruiting civil servants or police or nurses or economists from the dole queue, or from people whose skillset is in imminent danger of being rendered obsolete by an algorithm. Just like the private sector, they have the remarkable ability to hire people that already have jobs or good job prospects by offering them more money (or more flexible work and better pensions, or a fancier title, or something that interests them more)
Government has exactly the same ability to hire people as the private sector (more actually; it has a broader revenue base, can offer more unique privileges and actually has near monopsony hiring power in many areas... and no, people don't train to become NHS healthcare practitioners because the local supermarket is replacing people with kiosks!) and does not need to create unemployment to be able to man its offices.
Quite the opposite actually, when unemployment shoots up governments in most developed countries have the obligation to pay lots of people unemployment benefits for , not working for them, and generally that's about the time it starts cutting the size of its own departments.