[MD] US democracy at work?

[Ham Priday]

Greetings, Dan --

On Sun. Feb 27, 2011 at 12:22 PM, Dan Glover <daneglover at gmail.com> wrote:


> Hi Andre and all,
>
> I've been following the developments in Wisconsin with
> great interest.  I live in Illinois, which like Wisconsin is also
> facing a growing budget deficit due mainly to entitlements.
> In short, we're going broke paying public employees as
> much or more in retirement than they made during their
> working days. Not only that, but their health care is provided
> as well.
>
> As a regular working stiff, no one pays for my pension or my
> health care. I am expected to provide that myself. And I don't
> have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with
> however is my property taxes going up year after year in order
> to make sure public employees enjoy benefits that I will never enjoy.
>
> The (newly elected) governor of Wisconsin is attempting to
> balance the budget there by doing away with these entitlements.
> In order to achieve this, it is (deemed) necessary to strip the
> public unions of their bargaining power, otherwise it is all just
> going to happen again. The key word here is "public" which denotes
> paid by regular working joes and janes. In order to block the
> passage of the bills that the new governor is proposing, the minority
> Republicans are filibustering and hiding out.
>
> The use of filibuster goes back over a century here. ...

Kudos to you for the most lucid analysis of the public union problem I've 
read in some time!   I researched this topic for my Values Page this week, 
and wish I'd had your insight when selecting a suitable essay for this 
column.

America was founded as a "Constutional Republic", not a democracy.  Thomas 
Jefferson, who drafted the Constitution, was well aware that control by the 
majority could lead to tyranny.  He called democracy "...nothing more than 
mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of 
the other forty-nine."  This is certainly evident in the collective 
bargaining power of unions in bed with a govenment that is obliged to 
patronize them with the public's money.  As Jonah Goldberg writes in my 
online column, "The argument for public unionization wasn't moral, economic 
or intellectual.  It was rankly political."

Franklin Roosevelt believed that "the process of collective bargaining, as 
usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service."  Even 
George Meany, the first head of the AFL-CIO, held that it was "impossible to 
bargain collectively with the government."   Unfortunately, when organized 
labor (the backbone of the Democratic Party) began to lose ground in the 
1960s, President Kennedy lifted the federal ban on government unions by 
executive order.  This caused public union membership to skyrocket, and 
government skyrocketed with it.  From 1989 to 2004, the American Federation 
of State, County and Municipal Employees gave nearly $40 million to 
candidates in federal elections, 98.5% of which went to the Democrats.

Because government workers are "people in the government business", they 
have an inherent interest in boosting the federal tax dollars their local 
governments get.  Such political collusion works against the principles of a 
representative democracy and gives a bad name to a nation dedicated to 
individual freedom and self-reliance.  For those reasons alone, 
"collectivism" as a public union movement should be repealed.  Since America 
also happens to be a nation governed by laws, hopefully, the Wisconsin 
showdown will be the harbinger of legislation to that effect.

Thanks, Dan, and best regards,
Ham