From the article…
“The root cause of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis is an economy overburdened with regulation and an expansive public sector. In addition to high levels of government employment, the island also boast a rich welfare system. Welfare benefits in Puerto Rico actually exceed the median family income on the island.”
The root clause of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis is socialism, aka “legal plunder”
Legal Plunder Has Many Names
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism.
Above all, if you wish to be strong, begin by rooting out every particle of socialism that may have crept into your legislation. This will be no light task.
http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html
Men combined to subvert our civil government, to plunder and murder us, can have no right to protection in their persons or properties among us; they have by their attempts upon our liberty, put themselves in a state of war with us, as Mr. Locke observes, and being the agressors, if they perish, the fault is their own.
To All Nations of Men - Boston 1773 Daniel Leonard 1740-1820
Most government employment is a welfare system. Would taxpayers voluntarily fund more than a fraction of the "services" government provides us? Imagine if it was like the private sector and you could simply choose not to buy a particular product or service. But that would make sense and necessarily cull the dead wood, and we can't have that.