BUT WHAT THE HELL DO I KNOW... ..about public sector unions?

..about public sector unions?

The president is pushing hard to borrow $50 billion more dollars from China so that he can funnel it to bloated unionized state bureaucracies in the name of an “emergency measure” to avoid “massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters”. This wouldn’t be the first time the president has come to the rescue, as the so-called “Stimulus” plan also put billions in the hand of localities to pay public employee wages. Obama’s “Build America Bonds”, a federal subsidy program for municipal bonds, is another example of the raiding of the US treasury by local public employee unions.

But it’s for teachers! Police! Fire-fighters!

These three professions tug on our heartstrings, and the president knows it. They are the stuff of K-8 career days and local town fairs across America. But these three groups have increasingly become example not of sacrifice and civil service but of stubborn, selfish, bald-faced greed and brutish, sometimes threatening machine politics.

How did this happen? Why is the president so beholden to these special interests? The answer is the almighty power and perverse incentives of public employee unions.

Peter Scheer in the San Francisco Chronicle article sums it up perfectly:

Public unions’ traditional strength – the ability to finance their members’ rising pay and benefits through tax increases – has become a liability. Although private-sector unions always have had to worry that consumers will resist rising prices for their goods, public sector unions have benefited from the fact that taxpayers can’t choose – they are, in effect, “captive consumers.”

There’s nothing wrong with unions. But public-employee unions aren’t real unions. They’re collusive cartels that use campaign donations, organized get-out-the-vote onslaughts and sometimes physical threats to literally buy the acquiescence of those with whom they should be “negotiating”. The politicians are supposed to be working for we the taxpayer. But we the taxpayer have no seat at the table between the public employee unions and their political benefactors. Did I mention that public employees make more than the average private sector work that pays for their largesse?

It’s time to ban public employee unions.

Put point blank, public employee unions are parasitic. They leech off taxpayer money and use it to campaign for politicians that will leech off even more in a vicious cycle that’s unraveling our states and transforming our nation into a bankrupt wannabe Greece. They secure pay raises amid a deep recession when the rest of workforce is facing layoffs and falling wages. In public education, these organizations fight tooth and nail to limit choice for our neediest students, leaving them to hope for a win at actually LOTTERIES in the hope of getting a decent education while they double-dip on the dole. This has to stop.

In the states in which I live, work and travel, New Jersey, New York and California, the public union madness has truly transformed these sovereigns into dysfunctional nightmares of sham governance where warning of “unimaginable chaos” accompanies budget negotiations. We are Greece. Forget the national federal debt. Our states and localities are on the brink of anarchy all because massive unionized bureaucracies have gorged on the public who paid little attention to their growth during the boom but are now stuff with the bloat in the bust.

All this says nothing about private unions. My criticism should not be applied to these private organizations which should be free to operate peacefully as voluntary collective entities. But public employees are not voluntary because their salaries are paid by coerced taxation. The alleged “right” to take your income by force MUST preclude your “right” to lobby with those funds to take more.

It’s time to ban public employee unions.

They weren’t always legals, you know. In fact, it just so happens that the man who legalized public unions in the bankrupt and miserable state of California, Jerry Brown, is running for governor this season. He can attest first hand the fact that these parasites are a relatively new phenomenon, since he helped create them. How anyone in California could vote for this man, whose amazing ignorance of economics has lead him to believe that “we need more welfare and fewer jobs” is beyond me. If Jerry Brown wins in California, it will be one more example of the vicious cycle of public employee largesse undermining the functioning of democracy.

It’s time to ban public employee unions…

…but what the hell do I know? (I only live in Jersey)

Jonny

Wait- really?If I follow your logic, it goes like this:"Governments fund all their activities by means of taxes, which are collected by force. Force is a violation of someone’s rights, ergo the government (and everyone who’s working for it) has to give up their rights. In short, by working for the government, you give up your constitutional rights (specifically, the right to peaceably assemble)."That kind of reasoning would imply that all public servants should be treated as criminals and arrested by the police… except the police are paid by tax money. OH, SWEET LADY IRONY!Look, I don’t deny a certain amount of sympathy for anarchism, but don’t dress up anarchistic logic as a cry for fiscal responsibility.It’s one thing to say that public employees shouldn’t get a pay increase during a recession, or that public employee unions have fostered unrealistic expectations which need to be checked. It’s quite another to say that we need to fire public employees for unionizing. If anything, we ought to move in the opposite direction: encourage public employees to behave more like private sector workers. Sometimes we (society) do this by fostering competition from the private sector (a la universities). Sometimes the institution does it by instituting internal meritocracies. In any case, don’t confuse public servant with public slave.Also, keep in mind that public sector workers often just do good work for their pay because they have a work ethic.
Jonny

Wait- really?

If I follow your logic, it goes like this:

"Governments fund all their activities by means of taxes, which are collected by force. Force is a violation of someone’s rights, ergo the government (and everyone who’s working for it) has to give up their rights. In short, by working for the government, you give up your constitutional rights (specifically, the right to peaceably assemble)."

That kind of reasoning would imply that all public servants should be treated as criminals and arrested by the police… except the police are paid by tax money. OH, SWEET LADY IRONY!

Look, I don’t deny a certain amount of sympathy for anarchism, but don’t dress up anarchistic logic as a cry for fiscal responsibility.

It’s one thing to say that public employees shouldn’t get a pay increase during a recession, or that public employee unions have fostered unrealistic expectations which need to be checked. It’s quite another to say that we need to fire public employees for unionizing. If anything, we ought to move in the opposite direction: encourage public employees to behave more like private sector workers. Sometimes we (society) do this by fostering competition from the private sector (a la universities). Sometimes the institution does it by instituting internal meritocracies. In any case, don’t confuse public servant with public slave.

Also, keep in mind that public sector workers often just do good work for their pay because they have a work ethic.
John Papola

Jonny,

I’m not advocating anarchism here. What I’m saying is that the nature of the public sector makes it reasonable to ban unionization for public employees. Again, these organizations are fundamentally collusive with the state and the fact that the state can take by force must allow for some regulation on those with whom they collude.

The UAW in Detroit, for example, could certainly try to buy control of Ford by funneling their dollars into the purchase of shares. But even if they could execute a hostile takeover of the company, that would not ensure their income. Ford still must make money through voluntary sales to consumers.

This is not true of public sector unions. They can and do funnel money into the political process, take control of the state machinery and then use it to rob the taxpayer.

None of this precludes the fact that there are plenty of hard working people in the public sector. It’s simply to say that if you’re going to make your money from the monopoly of power, you don’t get to collude through collective agreements.

Anarchism, while intellectually pure in its rejection of the state, is too ignorant to the information embedded in the fact that states have emerged in almost every civilization. It’s a utopian ideal.

The state is a special institution relative to all other private collective bodies. It has the guns and the monopoly power to tax and coerce. Given that special privilege, it’s completely consistent with acknowledgement of the state to demand constraints on how the state can be used against the people.
John Papola

Jonny,I’m not advocating anarchism here. What I’m saying is that the nature of the public sector makes it reasonable to ban unionization for public employees. Again, these organizations are fundamentally collusive with the state and the fact that the state can take by force must allow for some regulation on those with whom they collude.The UAW in Detroit, for example, could certainly try to buy control of Ford by funneling their dollars into the purchase of shares. But even if they could execute a hostile takeover of the company, that would not ensure their income. Ford still must make money through voluntary sales to consumers.This is not true of public sector unions. They can and do funnel money into the political process, take control of the state machinery and then use it to rob the taxpayer.None of this precludes the fact that there are plenty of hard working people in the public sector. It’s simply to say that if you’re going to make your money from the monopoly of power, you don’t get to collude through collective agreements. Anarchism, while intellectually pure in its rejection of the state, is too ignorant to the information embedded in the fact that states have emerged in almost every civilization. It’s a utopian ideal.The state is a special institution relative to all other private collective bodies. It has the guns and the monopoly power to tax and coerce. Given that special privilege, it’s completely consistent with acknowledgement of the state to demand constraints on how the state can be used against the people.

exploring the worlds of economics and philosophy with passionate skepticism.

..about public sector unions?

It’s time to ban public employee unions.