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You know, convicted murderer and fugitive from justice Assata Shakur?
Alleged burgler, robber and terrorist Assata Shakur?
I'm not thinking that most people are thinking Ms Shakur is someone deserving of a glowing memorial but rather that she's someone who needs to be buried in secrecy so her grave don't get violated.
This was just the disconnect that made me realize what had been bugging me the most about public service unions, like teacher's unions.
The point of government employees is to serve the public and to hire specialists in the tasks the public want done with economies of scale that come from having a group dedicated to a task instead of an ad-hoc individual effort by the citizens.
Can you imagine our roads if we had to maintain them individually and independently and were only responsible for the section fronting our properties?
In essence, what a county roadworks is, is the citizens pooling their resources to hire a paving company to take care of their roads.
Where it falls apart once a public union gets involved is the union doesn't represent the needs or wants of the people who created and fund the public works. The union represents the employees hired by the public works.
If there wasn't a common feature of public works involved, I don't think I'd be too upset.
Tax supported monopoly.
I can't take my business elsewhere and I can't get out of paying for it.
This is wrong. This should be illegal as it is malum in se.
The problem with public-sector unions in general is that they are missing an essential ingredient of the equation: the greedy capitalist-pig owner. They're up against people who depend, at seventh and last, on those employees' votes for their jobs, and this unbalances things. The people the unions are up against don't care---it's not their money and they aren't trying to make a profit.
ReplyDeleteIn the good old days, public employees had an implicit deal---they just about weren't going to get fired except for egregious misconduct, and their jobs were always going to be there. To balance that, their pay wasn't the greatest and they couldn't unionize or go on strike. Samuel Gompers (that well-known labor-baiter) and FDR (well-known far-right extremist) were both very much against public-employee unions. This changed under JFK, who'd have trafficked his sisters and mother to the North Koreans for votes. With results we now see.