(Warner Todd Huston) – Yeah, I know… it’s like a broken record around here. But, here is another voice coming to our side to agree with us that public employees unions are antithetical to good government, wholly un-democratic, and, therefore, quite un-American. This time it’s the well-regarded Michael Barone echoing our mantra.
Barone is one of the best political reporters in the country and in his own inimitable way has jumped on the anti-union bandwagon (not that he never has in the past, just that this piece is particularly on par).
Before he gets to government unions, one of his points is that unions aren’t even needed in the private sector anymore because all the evils that employers perpetrated in the days of yore have now been regulated away by governments and laws. Because of an active government unions just aren’t needed to protect workers anymore, says Barone. It is a good point, after all.
Barone then goes onto government employees unions which he says are “not adversarial but collusive.”
Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits — and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.
Barone then says that this “parasitic” relationship has put the states into bankruptcy. Exactly what we’ve said a hundred times here on the blog.
Barone then notes that Obama is the union’s knight in shinning armor…
One-third of last year’s $787 billion stimulus package was aid to state and local governments — an obvious attempt to bolster public-sector unions. And it was a successful one: While the private sector has lost 7 million jobs, the number of public-sector jobs has risen. The number of federal government jobs has been increasing by 10,000 a month, and the percentage of federal employees earning over $100,000 has jumped to 19 percent during the recession.
Obama and his party are acting in collusion with unions that contributed something like $400,000,000 to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic Party.
He ends his piece expressing the hope that the next Congress might be less obligatorily obsequious to unions. But I doubt it, myself. My guess is that unions won’t be crippled until a total economic collapse is seen at their hands.
(Mr. Huston writes The Union Label Blog)
