The government shutdown will cost the country billions in lost output and taxpayer funds, but perhaps we can get one thing out of it, because it certainly won’t be a wall: a lesson.

The government is too big and too bad of an employer. Whereas private employment is beholden to market forces, giving workers the power to negotiate salaries and demand more from employers, federal workers are reliant on the stagnant bureaucracy. The law prevents federal employees from striking, as they work not for those in charge of paying them, Congress, but for taxpayers. While the public are the stakeholders in federal employment, the government itself is an unreliable employer, replacing common consumer sense and the entrepreneurial instinct with an astoundingly inept bureaucracy.