Does working for the government carry a higher moral burden?

I have a thought that goes something like this. If I want to work in the private sector, I search the market and eventually find a job. When I take it, me and my employer both freely agree to an exchange of money for time. No coercion takes place. Hence this is morally kosher. The money my employer pays me is also kosher. Customers freely give a firm money in exchange for a product/service. The firm then pays me a share.

Government work is different. Even if I perform the exact same job, I’m participating in coercion much more directly. I freely agree to work for the government and visa versa so that part is the same. But the money the government pays me with is obtained through coercion, by the threat of men with guns coming to your door if you don’t give them what they demand. Hence working for the state carries a special kind of moral badness not present in most private sector jobs.

If true, what does this mean? I guess my conclusion here would be something like

• Taking money that has been acquired through coercion is bad
• This badness can still be outweighed by other considerations
• Hence working for the state is sometimes okay, but you should have a higher bar for yourself when accepting government jobs/money as opposed to private sector ones. Some examples:
• If I decide to write papers and post them on a substack that people pay to subscribe to, it’s fine if they’re shitty/poorly done/irregular. If people don’t like it they don’t have to pay me. On the other hand if I’m an academic I should care much more because I effectively have a captive audience. The aggregate taxpayer subscribers I have can’t unsubscribe. (Okay, maybe they can in some kind of very removed way where they vote for different govs/policies etc… but still). Hence I need to make really sure that the stolen money I’m partaking in is actually well spent on providing value.

Some counterarguments

• If you’re a full on consequentialist, you probably shouldn’t care about proccess/justice/dessert/coercion etc… All you care about it which choice leads to better outcomes. If working for a bandit leads to people being better off, do it. If there are game theorietic concerns and problems with individually optimal choices leading to bad social equilibria, then just make the choice that leads to the better equlibria.
• If you think state’s aren’t coercive/are legitimate in taking resident’s money, then this whole thing is a nothing burger.
• Ditto if you think markets are inherently coercive because the threat of “if you don’t work you starve”.