Organized Coercion
The more it changes, the more it's the same, hmmm? In this present instance, meaning our country's seemingly fresh-scented wrangle over union power. The scent isn't fresh at all, nor is the wrangle. The arguments are old, the question at stake is old: namely, when is the public interest served by giving organized coercion its way?
Lately, we haven't thought much about that question in America; which is why Wisconsin takes us by surprise—the raging public employees, the adamant governor and the fugitive Democratic senators, hiding out to avoid a vote on stripping public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights. What's this? Teachers abandoning the students whose parents pay them?
It's the nature of the coercive approach, the union approach: here, give me your arm so I can twist it. Unionism doesn't work apart from organized force, as in the union heyday of the '30s and '40s. Unionism gained popular support in that day against supposedly heartless employers who expected workers to work on the terms they accepted when hiring on, not on those terms the union demanded, such as higher wages.
Unionism's chief coercive tactic is the strike—the withdrawal of services as a means of making employers do things the unions' way. The mere threat of a strike could make employers come around. Unions ruled the roost in late-industrial America—until paying the price of organized coercion became too great for employers who closed plants or took their work overseas.
Even before that, organized coercion was turning off the public. A wave of post-World War II strikes in steel, automobiles and electrical manufacturing disrupted daily life. John L. Lewis, of the flamboyant eyebrows and rolling rhetoric, led coal workers on strike in April 1946, causing much of the country's industrial production to shut down. The U.S. government took over the coal mines and imposed most of the union's terms on the owners. President Truman talked of drafting workers into the military if the railroad unions went on strike.
The Republican Congress, elected that year, passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman's veto, restricting organized coercion in various ways. Among them: banning the closed shop—i.e., you had to join a union to work—in states that adopted right to work laws. Among issues agitating Midwestern and Northeast public employee unions in 2012: proposals to pass right to work laws, as have 22 other states, and accord workers the right to refuse union membership.
Organized coercion by labor works in limited and specific ways. As we see, it can shut down schools in Wisconsin. It also works against itself. Basically, it undermines flexibility and freedom, two essential attributes of flourishing economies. A union that can say, "Do it our way, see?" is thinking in the terms of today rather than those of tomorrow—the province of businessmen alert to changing conditions that require constant adaptation. A union contract—the modern equivalent of the Law of the Medes and the Persians—is the last place you look for flexibility and permission to alter flagging or flabby strategies. Organized coercion abjures flexibility. What's good for one is good for all, might be its creed.
Naturally, organized coercion provides no room for individual dissent. The closed shop exists to keep dissent to a minimum. How else ya gonna present a united front? All together now: We want ... we want ... !
Human affairs since that messy business in Eden require constant rebalancing. The old unions weren't always wrong about the indifference of capitalists who minimized compensation and safety requirements to save money and cut corners. The human race, if we don't all know it by now, is generally nutty. What, all the same, is organized coercion save the dictatorial enterprise of people who, via their own membership, in humanity are as nutty as anyone else?
The marketplace, with its large space for choice and constant realignments of ideas and enterprise, is the forum that can reinvigorate America. That's what Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin sees, with a clarity and courage that do him honor.
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Sorry, Bill, this seems like overkill and flogging a dying horse to me. Union labor is down to 30% of government workers and 7% of private-sector workers, according to what I heard on the radio the other day. And all the pubic-sector unions in Wisconsin say they want is to keep collective bargaining and not have to face recertification votes every year. As for their awful coercion, nobody seems to be forcing those tens of thousands of people demonstrating in Madison. No one--but no one--seems to have been deliberately physically hurt yet by pro-union demonstrators. And as far as I can gather, the schools in some few places were closed one Friday in February because of teachers ducking out to demonstrate.
Seems to me that what these bullying union thugs are saying isn't so much Do it our way as Don't Tread on Me. In these days of free-market totalitarianism, the labor movement is one of the most honorably reactionary institutions going. I don't expect the liberals who call themselves conservatives to give labor the time of day, but reactionaries--i.e., genuine Christians, real patriots, local conservationists--ought to be attending to what labor says and does with respect and reason.
My friend Bill Murchison has the standard Republican approach to unions, but in this case, friend Ray (a private joke), he is right. It seems to me that those who work for the taxpayer and through their unions can bribe and intimidate legislators into raising their salaries and benefits are in a different position from working stiffs. Of the public school teachers I have met over the years, I really don't want more than a handful of them in the same room with children, let alone teach them, and the media coverage of these rude shouting illiterate jerks does not encourage confidence in their mental acuity or moral maturity. Fire them all, if you can, Gov. Walker. Here in Rockford, the police and firefighters unions have featherbedded the city into near bankruptcy. Nothing so makes me willing to see the good side of libertarian anarcho-capitalism as these conspirators against the taxpayer who are insulated from economic reality. By the way, it was my eight years in Wisconsin public schools, when they were much better than they are now, that taught me to despise school teachers.
Tom and Ray,
I always assumed the reason our Southern border was opened so wide for so long was to break the back of what was left of the private Unions and to help satiate the grwoing ganglands with a steady supply of dope and mind numbing drugs. Scab labor, shoddy workmanship in the building trades along with the export of the manufacturing base has already gutted the private Unions. These public Unions, however, are a different breed. Am I too cynical or just plain wrong?
Even many of the private unions are useless or worse these days, becoming nothing more than sad parodies of the plutocrats they used to fight against once upon a time. Since Mexican peasants can pay dues just as well as working class Whites, throw those borders open.
Dr. Fleming's comments on teachers remind me of his book "Montenegro," where he cited how Tito's partisans targeted teachers. The difference is Yugoslavia's teachers focused on content and that is what made them a threat. American government schools frown on content and enculturate students in our insipid brave new world, devoid of authentic Western roots.
Dr. Fleming's rejoinder to me strikes home. As far as public school teachers go, I share most of his biases. I'd prefer replacing the public school system with homeschooling and small schools immediately responsible to the communities they serve and debarred from government financing and regulation (separation of school and state). I'd prefer that unions were local affairs, too, dealing with businesses that were also local, but that will be long time coming again. (But to what extent are teachers and other public employees advocates and stabilizers of genuine communities already? Does destabilizing their lives help or hurt those communities? I'm just asking, and I've always thought that teachers should be more entrepreneurial, creating and running distinctive schools with distinctive curricula, which I admit won't happen until government funding and regulation are axed.) So let the present-day unions die. If only big business and its doppelganger, big government, would die with them.
From what I can see, the fundamental problem faced by Wisconsin and the other states is that Globalism, as copiously discussed and documented in Chronicles, has finally succeeded in wrecking the middle and working classes. The result is that governmental revenues have flattened, or outright declined, even as local and state tax rates have been increased. The money is simply not available to fund the status quo any longer. States such as California and Illinois are trying to fill the revenue gap by borrowing money. But, this is only a workable strategy if revenues eventually rise substantially enough to cover principal and interest payments.
So, what about tax increases? This assumes that there is more blood left to be squeezed out of taxpaying turnips. If a person or family are living close to the edge, the combination of declining income, declining house valuation, increased fuel costs, increased living costs, and increased taxation will push many over the edge. This will result in yet more foreclosures, and fewer purchases, directly striking the two major funding sources for local and state governments: property and sales taxes. From my experience, this is a real threat to governmental solvency.
So, it really does not matter if the unions and progressives manage to push back Governor Walker's efforts. The constitutional requirement for a balanced state budget, combined with plummeting tax revenues are going to force substantial reductions in spending no matter what.
Government employee unions need to limited in scope if only because they control many of the politicians they negotiate with. I believe private sector unions are a different breed in many ways - and to lump them together leads to confusion.
Also, private sector unions have also been decimated by outsourcing, open borders, and globalism. All of which most public school teachers support. One reason so few of their union "Brothers" are rallying to their cause.
You can read the Bureau of Labor's union membership summary for 2010 here:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
My father was a union member (retail clerks, I think) when he worked for an Ace Hardware store. I only know this because I saw his membership card once. He never talked about union activities because I don't think they were important to him. He and the owner of the hardware store were good friends.
I was an associate member of the longshoreman's union when I worked on the dock in Kenosha, Wisconsin when I was on summer leave from the Naval Academy. I think they took $2 a week from my pay. It was a great summer job because the pay was good and there was a lot of overtime at double pay. If I recall, every hour on Saturday and Sunday was double time. All I had to do was show up any day I wanted to work and I got hired because I had a reputation as someone who would put in good work for good pay. I never heard anyone on the dock complain about any work-related issues. I did hear the regulars complain about some of the temporary hires who they thought were not working hard enough. Those people didn't get hired again.
Yes, the Unions served a useful purpose but as Matt Webber states above they have in many ways today become one with the plutocrats they now serve. 15 -- 20 years ago when Pat Buchanan was telling the duopoly that exporting our manufacturing base and doubling our Foreign policy obligations was a recipe for national disaster, I developed some respect for little Jimmy Hoffa for sending some folks over to Ames, Iowa to support Mr. Buchanan in his campaign.
Little Bush on the other hand had some cooked up country music performers and some shiney cowboy boots that hurt his feet( no Iowa farmer mind you, could have possibly mistaken Bush's boots for what Merle Haggard once described as "manly footwear") to assist in perpetrating his fraud about Free Trade and greed is good.
It is a little different version up in Wisconsin today, but I imagine when the dust clears the folks in Wisconsin will come to understand that they simply can't afford for either the Republicans or Democrats to win.
#2
Dr. Fleming.
It turns out that the "libertarian anarcho-capitalist" approach to the Wisconsin protests, as laid down by Walter Block, has been even more pronounced.
They, in fact, do not oppose the unions protesting. They want the protests to continue. Why?
1) The children get several days off schools. They get this chance to read interesting novels, drive down to the woods for hiking, go fishing, and enjoy themselves.
2) The worst enemy of the Auburn libertarians, David Koch, gets to be publicly humiliated and embarassed. The Kochs have cheated some of them in the past, caused them to lose much money, and gotten away with it (because the Auburners did not want a lawsuit with a billionaire).
3) The union members of public schools shall be forced to pound their chests in fury for several days on with no end.
4) Billionaire donors and controllers of the political process will also be weakened and cut out by their union opposition.
I must sympathise. They have gotten it just right. The Wisconsin protests are a win-win-win-win situation. I now realize that the austerity reforms and austerity protests in Europe are both wonderful things, partly because they will save the taxpayer and partly because they will gut out the billionaire rent-seekers who are temporary allies of the taxpayers, but not for very long.
Is it not interesting that public employees feel the need to unionize? Isn't the government supposed to be fair and good? Aren't all government decisions made for the well-being of mankind? I thought only the private sector was greedy and evil-and had to be restrained by government lest it run amok. Could it be that all people have the inherent proclivity to make evil choices? Oh please have a Democrat contact me and tell me it isn't so.
So said, people should have the right to organize, even public employees. What unions of any kind should not have the right to do is prevent their employers from hiring others if their members choose not to work for the wages and benefits offered. You may strike against me if you wish, but I may hire replacement workers as I choose (Oh, and you might not get your job back if I am satisfied with their work.)
What follows could be a comment to any blog on the Chronicles website. I would value comments, particularly from Dr. Fleming, because I find it so depressing to follow current events and social conditions. It is: who cares? Western Civilization and American Civilization is dead, and has been for years. All that is left are habits of the past continuing into the present. Those habits are gradually disappearing. I first noticed this as an undergraduate, when all my dreams vanished down the black hole of modernity. Things have only become worse since, with no indication I have seen that they might become better. It would be impossible to find one citizen in 100 who has, the education, understanding, or sense of that civilization sufficient to continue it. As a product of the modern tendency, I doubt if I have it. I merely have an awareness of lacking it. Is it possible to live in the present, or can one only live sanely by living in the past?
I am a teacher of sorts; I tutor students in mathematics, grammar, history, economics and physics. My wife and I are now the proud parents of a newly born son. We have not a single intention of allowing him to enter the 'misejumacashun system'. I'll teach him at home. Concerning the teacher unions across this once-great land: to hell with them. A worthy teacher is a rare find-indeed.
I think I understand what Jeff means by saying that "people should have the right to organize," but perhaps we might be a bit more precise. When we use a word like "right," we often mean that it is something one possesses by virtue of being human or as one of God's creatures. Thus some people believe that people have a right to life, but they could not say "should have a right to life." I don't think you are suggesting that there is a natural right or a God-given right to organize a union.
On the other hand, we also speak of civil rights as the rights of citizens under law or a particular Constitution. But again, some people claim that under the Constitution people have a right to bear arms but not that they should have such a right. They have it, according to 2nd Amendment devotees, whether they can exercise it or not. Now, in the Constitution as written and amended, there is no right to organize. Are you saying that there should be?
I don't think you are. What I think you are arguing that it is on the whole better for laborers to be able to join unions, and a variety of arguments could be adduced in support--just as a number of arguments could be made against. This leaves us in the position where we have to judge the merits of the case without too much reliance on any higher law
Dr. Fleming, You are correct, and I apologize for not thinking it through carefully and making myself more clear. I did not mean a God given right. I do tend to think they should have a political right to do so, though in response to your provocation of thought, I do see that we might not alway wish to allow it. As I am anti union on principle, I would not wish a Constitutional right to unionize. It has always seemed to me that people with marketable skills and excellent job performance do not need to unionize. They will command top value for their labor. It is only the average, or worse, who want protection. They offer that which is easily replaced and not worth much. I see no reason why they should enjoy special privilege. It does seem that, just as any of us has the right to form a club, write by-laws, collect dues, and so on, a union is the same kind of organization-except for its right to disrupt. That right it should not have. And, as an individual employee has a right to decide whether or not to work for an offered wage and benefit package, so groups of employees should be able to discuss with each other the wages and benefits offered them and decide as a group whether or not they are wiling to accept the terms. If they are not, I see no reason why they cannot cease working in unison. However, if they stop working, they should retain no rights to their employment and their employer should have every right to decide his own course of action: offer higher wages, hire replacement employees, or close business.
Jeff @12 "Is it possible to live in the present, or can one only live sanely by living in the past?"
Jeff,
Yes and no. For each of us, we live in the age God gave us and not the one we might prefer. I prefer the darkness of modernity because one can always see yonder stars more readily. Our people have always endured such things and will again. In these times the prizes of friendships are richer, their mere discovery more surprising and their passing more tearful. Heroes too are rare but all the more gallant.
I remember having breakfast with Pat Buchanan one morning with several rich oil men who were begging Pat to make peace with his detractors -- "No there is nothing I can do to please them, we will just need to whip them or go down speaking the truth." Similar experiences with old men like Tom Fleming, Dr. Landis, Clyde Wilson, Claude Polin and so many others could be recounted by others I am sure. There is no substitute for young men than to behold such courage in their elders. So yes, these times are not for the weak of heart but neither was the seige of Troy, the death of Roland during the battle of Roncevaux Pass, the breaking of Islam at Tours, the gallantry at Gettysburg, or any number of other of the great deeds of our Fathers.
Against this, the gray, anonymous, ugly and isolated human being shorn of his nobility and dignity is a pitiful sight made more so by the barabarian who suurounds him. Once accurately described as follows:
"We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile"
But against this there is the country of the Scented Rose where the company is so glorious that we receive their support and have communion with our living past. As another author once descibed it:
"The Mother of God is ours. Our dead are with us. Even in these our earthly miseries we always hear the distant something of an eternal music, and smell a native air. There is a standard set for us whereto our whole selves respond, which is that of an inherited and endless life, quite full, in our own country."
These are the best times for men who write and edit for Chronicles ando teach at their schools. There is no other time when it was likely to go better. And thank God we get to watch it and attempt to understand it.
Tom Landess is old enough to be my father, Robert. He was a drummer boy in the late unpleasantness and Clyde Wilson fought in WWI.
There is an important sense in which we must live in the past if we are to experience the present sanely and fully. It is only knowledge of earlier generations and their accomplishments that makes it possible to judge our own generation and to strive for higher standards. Reading even Wodehouse reminds me of how far we have fallen from the excellence of his plots and the grace of his imaginary world. I read yesterday an account of someone who had been in company with the great French dramatist Racine. The subject of Sophocles came up, and Racine whipped out a Greek text of the Oedipus and translated it for his friends, who knew the French theater well. The writer who tells the story says it was the most moving dramatic experience he had ever had. My point is that Racine did not measure himself by the contemporaries he excelled but by the best. That is the trouble with generational jingoism--the Rush-Sean-Mark twaddle about America as the greatest little country in the history of the world. Even if it were true, this attitude breeds complacency, a satisfaction with the second, or in our case third and fourth rate, that prevents us from ever striving to do better.
Tom,
I meant older as in my elders and betters, not in years of service. BUT even in that category your years of experience seem ancient to a mere youngster like myself!!
I understand. When I turned 50--as Robert has done just recently--I began to find ways of making my seniors (ancients like Clyde Wilson and Mel Bradford) feel their age. I pretended to admire the wisdom they had acquired in a long and useful life and asked pleasant questions about trusses and old folks homes.
Dr. Fleming - did you get any useful information on trusses that you can pass on?
Before one dances around the funeral pyre of unionism, I would give you Exhibit A, which is the city of Austin, Minn. In 1985-86, the private meatpackers union went on strike against Hormel which wanted to slash their wages and benefits. The strike was a failure and the union busted. Now for a while, there were people willing to work at Hormel for less than half of what their fathers made working in the good old days of the 1950s and 60s (even the 70s were a paradise if you ask people in Austin). But then came the great economic boom of the 1990s and people who could afford to be choosy decided what Hormel paid to be a meatpacker wasn't worth potentially getting their hands sliced up. So Hormel had a hard time finding workers in the area to man their plant. Now, instead of raising wages to make the job attractive again to a perspective laborer, you know what they did? They imported their workforce from Mexico! Yes, there were actually people who were willing to work even less than subsistence wages just to experience the miracle of modern indoor plumbing even if the winters were just a little bit colder than they were normally used to. And anyone who called Hormel on this was labeled a "racist".
So the "free market" in this case didn't exactly create an economic paradise of low taxes and high wages. Instead, it was a force of, how shall we put it? "creative reconstruction" which basically created barrios in many medium-sized towns like Austin across southern Minnesota and turned the once solidly Republican First Congressional District into one the DFL can compete and win in more often than not. And there are probably lots of other examples of those in communities all across the country, especially when it concerned the food industry.
Now I'm not saying one will need to brush up on one's Spanish to the deal with local DNR game warden (it may well your be Urdu language skills) because public and private unionization are two different animals altogether. But it should serve as a reminder while you may not like cops or firefighters or teachers or members of the highway department, many such people you will find, particularly in the rural Midwest, are like the same working stiffs found anyplace else. They hunt, fish, like NASCAR and football and are culturally conservative and nationalistic. You know, the kinds of people George Wallace, Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp appealed to for votes along with countless other conservative politicians? Scott Walker being one of them. A good quarter to a third of union members outside the big cities probably voted for him. Certainly Sam Francis didn't let their union cards keep him from calling them MARs.
So what's the point? Are we now into separating the white middle and working classes into different segments of good(non-union) and bad (union)because we're talking about taxes? Sure, everyone wants lower taxes. Everyone wants cheap food too. You have to pay for both. Do we need more immigrants to make sure all of society is less expensive? To hear it from the libertarians, you would think low prices is a God-given right and Wal-Mart the Temple. Much of what destroys that which is small and locally made and authentic comes down to expense. That which is big and mass produced and economically "efficient" is cheap. Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Gas, Big Ag, it all came together because of price and what people were willing to pay as their wages stagnated because they weren't in union anymore, at least in the private sector. So naturally they resent the public sector for wages they can't enjoy anymore and have to pay for.
What the Wisconsin question really comes down to is this: Is it the responsibility of government to sustain a middle class? A free market can create a "middling class" but its boom and busts cycles and inflation created natural human greed, often wipes this class out. The New Deal protected this class with unemployment insurance and Social Security; allowed it to go to college through the G.I. Bill and subsidized students loans in order to create an upper middle class of higher wage earners; allowed them to have homes out in country with Levittown and the all the Housing Acts. Allow them to travel and enjoy leisure with the Interstate Highways and labor laws; allowed them to take of themselves when they got sick with Medicare and allow them to keep farming despite surpluses with subsidies. If we say no, then I don't want to see another "conservative" politician, pundit or policy maker ever again wax poetic about the "God-fearin', hard workin' child rearin' American middle class" again because this class and its culture is the product of not just the market which sells them this image, but a government which helped to create and sustain it. If it's too expensive and they really are as parasitic as the inner city "welfare queen", then they must be told this in blunt fashion, not lied to again and again and again every two to four years. For its not just public worker who lives off my taxes.
Thank you robert and Dr. Fleming for you thoughtful response to my discontent. I am encouraged by your respective remarks.
Mr. Scallon: both ears and the tail! You speak my mind, with a real-world example that as a Minnesotan I should not have forgotten. I reiterate (see #6 above): execute big unions, but can big business and big government please follow it on the chopping block? Will free-market ideology really help with this? Is there anyone besides me who sees the totalitarian animus in the following statement? (Apologies to Jeff, since I doubt that he sees it. We're used to saying this kind of thing without listening to ourselves.)
"It has always seemed to me that people with marketable skills and excellent job performance do not need to unionize. They will command top value for their labor. It is only the average, or worse, who want protection."
Everyone must have "market value"--or else!! And if they can't or won't constantly up their value, they don't deserve any of those socialistic "safety nets" they're always crying for. Let 'em fall, let 'em die and remove the excess, market-valueless population. OK, but who is determining what those market values are, and on what morals do they base their valuation? And how do artists, small farmers, clergy, and the cretinous parasites who teach the children of all those who don't, won't, or can't homeschool fit into the free-market world? (Become entrepreneurs, I know. I'm simply trying to point up the inadequacy of free-market ideology and its niggardly view of humanity.)
I'm wandering off-topic, so let this be my last comment in this string.
The simple answer to Sean's question is "No. Ideally, it is not government's role to create or sustain the middle class." I would be happy if government would simply leave the middle class alone, since government policies designed to maintain and increase the middle class shave virtually eliminated it. What policies? The GI that flooded colleges with veterans who had no interest in higher learning and rapidly destroyed the character and standards of the schools; mortgage policies that encouraged people to look at homes as investments; and public education that has destroyed the minds and character of our children for three generations. And now, Sean, you actually think the teachers--the bottom of the barrel of high school graduates--should have, in addition to their bribery of legislators, collective bargaining rights? Any sane program for national renewal will begin by firing the lot of them and then rehiring the perhaps 10% who can actually do their job. Teachers are not just parasites: they are ticks carrying Lyme Disease.
"Ideally, it is not government’s role to create or sustain the middle class.”
-- Ideally yes, unfortunately it's going to take many generations to convince those of the middling sort to believe they should not ask for anything from government or seek anything: no payment not to farm, no student loan, no Medicare, no Social Security, no SBA loan. Perhaps this process has begun with Tea Parties and MARs are starting to see government itself as the enemy rather than as the cop who's supposed to take their side in a dispute and not the other fella', although the evidence is sketchy and not rather convincing.
If by law persons who wish to organize themselves of their own free will (which is why unions should not be closed shop and should recertify themselves yearly as Gov. Walker proposed and I do support) to bargain with an employer for wages or for better work conditions they should be allowed to do so no matter what the job out simple fairness. Otherwise there's no point in a union and they might as well be a sewing circle. If you say no, public employees are different than private union employees because they are paid in tax money, fair enough. But just remember lots of persons are paid with tax money which an individual has little or no say over either. Very little in our economy is "private" anymore. For example, I have little say how much a soldier, who is also a public employee, is paid. I have little say how much private firm who gets government contracts pays their employees or treats them, even though could one argue any business which makes its money off government patronage is a parasite too (such as Boeing or Halliburton for example, or a private prison company). I also have little say over how much a farmer is given in subsidy for their crops even if it makes my food more expensive than the open market says it should be. I also have little say over how big a mortgage is given to a prospective home buyer by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae or the terms of which the mortgage is written. Well, you know the end result.
The people who do have a say are elected officials both nationally and locally who sit in legislatures, or on boards and commissions and whose job it is to put together budgets for said unit of government. To say "their unions can bribe and intimidate legislators into raising their salaries and benefits" seems to me to be simply letting another group of middle class citizens off the hook once again. Do unions try to influence the outcome of elections for the purpose of putting persons friendly to their interests on said board,commissions and in legislatures? Of course they do. But it is the job of said representatives to look out for the taxpayer for whom they are elected represent, to balance what is needed to do the job right with the means available of doing so. It is too easy for them to simply let the bureaucrats run the government simply because they're supposedly the "experts" or else you want to keep them "happy". If you take that attitude then there's no point in having local elected officials at all. You might as well give the unions the combination to the safe and say take as much as you want.
It is also up to the taxpayers to go to the polls to vote for candidates who will defeat the unions' would-be puppets. Yet isn't it amazing more people vote in an election for a far away leader in a far away place than vote in elections for school boards or county boards who have more impact on their personal lives and finances with the decisions they make? Isn't it amazing more people watch C-SPAN than their city council meeting on their cable TV? Doesn't it also strike you as odd more people read about Charlie Sheen in the Life and Style section of theire local newspaper than the public records detailing all which goes on at the last school board meeting? Where are all the taxpayers of Wisconsin, so outraged by union salaries they cannot show up in the tens and hundred of thousands on the capitol square in Madison too? Are they too busy working to demonstrate? Okay, when there was an organized demonstration by state Tea Party and conservative groups in Madison on a weekend, how many persons did they draw? Maybe 8,000 at the most? Are there only 8,000 Wisconsin taxpayers willing to demonstrate support for the governor's budget? Gov. Walker better hope he has a "silent majority" or he's not going to have a legislative majority by the end of the year.
I constantly run into people amazed at the decisions their local village board makes or can't understand why this county official makes has his brother on the payroll or that teacher makes a large amount of money and has Cadillac-style health benefits? In response I say well, where were you when such decisions were made to voice your objections? You say you were too busy to attend one meeting a month, with what the ballgame? Desperate Housewives? Being on Facebook? You say you were too busy to vote in the spring election? With what, gardening? Your Twitter account? I have little sympathy for people who don't take what little power they have into their own hands or want to live in a community and yet leave its operation to somebody else in the spirit of "Can't Somebody Else Do It?" Yes they can and they usually cost you a pretty penny. Living on "Main St." or in the "out in the country" or "being part of a community" involves more than just an address.
By the way, if one cannot expect political solutions to cultural problems, I have a hard believing their are educational solutions to cultural problems either. Are hordes of would-be home-school teacher/mothers supposedly educated by the same rotten public school system going to do any better than the same teachers in the same system? It seems a little hard to believe. I'm afraid the attitude towards a child's education by many "out here" is the same towards their local government "Can't somebody else do it?" Not to mention the fact very few of these mothers or fathers are going to give up their middle class lifestyles by staying at home to teach their children. Indeed, only a few may do so. But as I seem to recall, the early Christians met few to a room or catacomb to educate and worship. I think this is what Dr. Fleming has in mind.
To make an unfortunately controversial statement, I must ask this: What is so great about the middle class?
So much of modern day politics revolves around rhetoric about protecting the middle class from whomsoever, but are they some treasure to be nurtured and protected?
Are we speaking about the 150 million sports fans who have their television sets on when Super Bowl is on (or any football/soccer watching equivalent in Europe)? Are we talking about the people who pour ketchup on their pasta and hold Stephanie Meyer as their highest ideal of literature? Are we talking about the beachgoers who can't locate Egypt on the map? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pedMB8zM2BQ Are we talking about the posters and commenters on the Free Republic and Huffington Post destroying their minds and souls by perpetual talk of politics?
If "disappearing" of the middle class means people will either choose a simpler life of trekking woods and chopping trees after a little rural migration or choose a loftier life of travelling around the world from Tibet to Istanbul and sampling new delicacies, hey bring it on!
#26,
That is a good point Mr. Sanjay. You have accurately highlighted the negative features of bourgeois culture.
However, to look at society as a whole, it is probably better to have a substantial bourgeois class than to not have one. A society where a tiny patrician elite rules over masses of prols with just a tiny sliver of a merchant class in between would be an extremely violent and unstable society. The class conflict would be too severe. The bourgeoisie is the class that demonstrates business entrepreneurship. It is the class that multiplies wealth through exploiting the given natural and human endowments of a country. Finally, it is the class that best allows upward mobility and therefore channels human competitive urges in a relatively healthy direction. Without the chance of becoming a bourgeois, ambitious prolos would have to become bandits.
In my view, a key problem of contemporary Western civilization (which is being exported around the world) is that the bourgeois values have been elevated to the top of the social pyramid. In almost all traditional civilizations that have endured for thousands of years, bourgeois values were either in the middle of the social pyramid, or even at the bottom. That is because the bourgeois, by definition, is only concerned with profit and has little use for the virtues of loyalty, honour, and patriotism in and of themselves. Those values are the domain of the clerical/scholarly and warrior classes. Yet in the contemporary West, the cleric/scholar is increasingly a salesman, and the warrior is increasingly a mercenary. These two traditional ruling classes have betrayed their vocations and allowed themselves to be subjugated to the bourgeosie.
ps. I would add that while the political rhetoric revolves around protecting the middle class, the actual policy is one of destroying the middle class. The middle bourgeois is being squeezed between such that all that will remain is the high bourgeosie (the real Super-class, not your local millionaire) and a growing proletariat.
pps. the "loftier life of traveling around the world travelling around the world from Tibet to Istanbul and sampling new delicacies..." you mention is only suitable for a relatively small portion of the population. The vast majority of people in the world who do so much travelling are not doing so to sample delicacies, but because they have been economically uprooted by corporate globalization.
Sean, I do not know if things work the same for Wisconsin school districts as they do here on the southern side of the Cheddar Curtain. Here, there is usually an alliance between the Booster Club and the teachers' union. This is the case for a number of school districts that I have known fairly well. Here in DeKalb, for a brief 4 years, we had a school board here that actually had some notion of fiduciary duty to taxpayers. This was a true threat to the status quo, and so student athletes were given quotas of how many fliers, printed at school expense, they had to deliver to get someone else elected president. It worked. It took 3 attempts of massive lying to get a referendum passed for a new high school that is not really needed. Most of the space is wasted on sports. So, we have an election for the school board coming up, and the leading candidates tend to have past associations with the referendum effort, and conflicts of interest for such things as having a spouse on the faculty.
Unfortunately, the lies about demographics directly indicate the lack of a sufficient tax base to support the district. So, right now, grade schools are being closed, schools are being "repurposed", and other desperate attempts being made to try to cling to the new white elephant high school. The board will raise the tax levies on an already overburdened populace, and this will make a bad foreclosure crisis even worse. The unions along with the jocks, are the main enablers of this mess, and they both need to be tossed into the dustbin of history.
Any school is reflection of the community its exists in. What you see is what you get and if DeKalb residents have mismanaged their school district in order to keep up with the Jones next door in suburban Chicago, then I have no sympathy for them. They wanted it, they got it and now they have to pay for it.
But aside from how this community or that community specifically operates, I must say I starting to detect, increasingly among conservatives, a sort of "Year Zero" enthusiasm towards local institutions one would find in the average Randian. The transition is seemingly being that local institutions are so corrupt and wasteful of the public's mney they have become unreformable and must be, as you say, "tossed into the dustbin of history" as a famous ideologue once said. One hears this said about the Catholic Church from time to time and yet cooler heads prevail. Hating the people inside the building is one thing, hating the building itself is quite another and its an attitude which would economically bankrupt many small communities on both sides of the "cheddar cutain." DeKalb may well survive given one of the biggest schoolhouses of all resides in it. But as I know from working in small towns like Crab Orchard, Carterville, Vienna, Anna and Goreville, in the southern part of Illinois along with Plum City, Elmwood, Bowler, Gresham, and Tigerton in Wisconsin, the unions and the jocks are bound up in fabric of the schools and getting "rid" of them is akin to getting rid of your liver to solve your drinking problem. Any libertarian can do a cost/benefit analysis and conclude most of the small school districts and towns in both our states are economically not viable and ought to be disbanded. But that's largely why they don't run anything and if conservatives want to head down the same path in order to fulfill the requirements of the "doctrine", then that's exactly where they will go and culturally conservative public employees will once again be forced to vote for pro-abortion political candidates just to keep their jobs.
Do you I have a conflict of interest in regards to this discussion because I cover high school sports for my employer? Your damn right I do. But I guess I never realized a high school wrestling program in Ellsworth, Wisconsin which has three to four generations of farm kids participating on it was somehow subverting the nation. I guess I better inform the coach, who happens to be an NRA member and has two sons fighting in Iraq, that he better disband the program and head for Galt's Gulch if he wishes to be truly patriotic.
@29,
Well, you are fortunate, then, to belong to or be associated with unions that still serve some socially beneficial purpose. I was a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in the mid-'70s and I got zilch from them. My dog got ahold of my dues book and had fun chewing it up; he got more use out of the union than I ever did. No one is talking about taking away your basic rights, only the ability to featherbed contracts in a way that is detrimental to the vast majority of people who do not belong to unions. If the members are doing such a great job, and are such a credit to the community as you say, then they should welcome these badly needed reforms.
@29, continued,
"But I guess I never realized a high school wrestling program in Ellsworth, Wisconsin which has three to four generations of farm kids participating on it was somehow subverting the nation."
It is typical of teacher's and other municipal unions to cry "we're doing it for the children" when all else fails. These children can be just as well served if their teachers and coaches get a grip and stop seeing their banal pay and benefits disputes in existential terms. ("Forced to vote for pro-abortion political candidates just to keep their jobs.") Nothing justifies voting pro abortion; no one who does so is remotely "culturally conservative". If these coaches and teachers are so well respected, so indispensably "bound up in fabric of the schools", why can't they field candidates from their own ranks?
"Hating the people inside the building is one thing, hating the building itself is quite another"
The writer has it backwards: to hate the building (the public employee unions, i.e., the sin) and love the people inside is the Catholic teaching on sin and sinners; so we hate these parasitic unions and their practices but await with open arms the union members, once they renounce their sinful ways.
Again, the correct metaphor is not the cutting out of one's liver to solve a drinking problem, but rather, excising or greatly reducing a cancerous growth to save the body politic. Better yet, to continue the drinking analogy, try this:
Step One: We admitted we were powerless over drinking at the public trough, that our appetites had become unmanageable.
Step Two: Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. (Economic sanity as directed by the will of the people not to pay confiscatory taxes.)
Etc., Etc.,