Collective bargaining in public employee unions

The danger is clear to anyone with a brain:

“It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”

That wasn’t Newt Gingrich, or Ron Paul, or Ronald Reagan talking. That was George Meany — the former president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O — in 1955. Government unions are unremarkable today, but the labor movement once thought the idea absurd.

The founders of the labor movement viewed unions as a vehicle to get workers more of the profits they help create. Government workers, however, don’t generate profits. They merely negotiate for more tax money. When government unions strike, they strike against taxpayers. F.D.R. considered this “unthinkable and intolerable.”

 

Government collective bargaining means voters do not have the final say on public policy. Instead their elected representatives must negotiate spending and policy decisions with unions. That is not exactly democratic – a fact that unions once recognized.

Common sense, people.  Common sense.

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Food for thought on Nixon and the GOP

You say conservatives run the GOP?

Think again.

At least that’s the case made in this very interesting post by Fabio Rojas over at orgtheory (via Will Wilkinson):

…[I]t is a mistake to view the modern GOP as the party run by free marketers and social conservatives. Instead, these two factions have been subordinated to a third faction – the Nixonites – who endorse a different agenda focusing on foreign interventionism, national security, and increasing executive power.

In other words, the narrative about Goldwater as the guiding light of the post-war GOP is wrong. Nixon, and his allies, have driven the agenda since the late 1940s. Other Republicans (Eisenhower, Goldwater, Reagan) represented factions who, at most, were allowed a seat at the table created by Nixon.

The post makes sense.  If anything, we’ve seen a concerted effort by religious and social conservatives to pull the Republican party further to the right over the past several years (fiscal conservatism strangely stayed out of that struggle apparently), and not much more of a fight for the soul of the party.

Perhaps that needs to change.