Politics & Power Quote by Don Young

The line lands like a blunt instrument: not just a policy claim, but a moral distinction between “real” work and work paid for by the state. Don Young, a long-serving Alaska congressman, is doing something familiar in American political rhetoric: recasting an economic argument as a question of legitimacy. Government jobs aren’t merely inefficient in this framing; they’re suspect, a kind of economic mirage that pads statistics while dodging the hard business of wealth creation.

The intent is to narrow the definition of recovery. If “solving the economy” means private-sector growth, entrepreneurship, and production, then public hiring becomes, at best, temporary scaffolding and, at worst, an admission of failure. That’s the subtext: a warning against dependency, bureaucracy, and the idea that Washington can hire its way out of structural problems. It’s also a preemptive strike against stimulus-style politics, where public employment programs can be sold as immediate relief. Young’s sentence tries to deny that relief the status of “solution.”

Context matters because Alaska is a state where federal spending is both omnipresent and politically awkward: military bases, resource management, infrastructure, and a huge federal footprint alongside a frontier ethos. That tension sharpens the quote’s edge. Young can accept federal dollars while still performing skepticism toward federal expansion, a stance that plays well in conservative coalitions: praise the paycheck, distrust the payroll office.

It works rhetorically because it offers a clean villain (the government) and a clean hero (the private sector), even as the real economy is messier and often deeply entangled with public investment.