Comments on: The Road to Fiefdom

By: The View From 1776

The View From 1776 — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 02:43:49 +0000

Municipal Unions: The Boa Constrictor Strangling America

---------- The socialist candidate who gets the backing of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the teachers' unions (NEA and the UFT) has a lock on the Democratic Pa…

By: C M

C M — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 02:52:23 +0000

“Considering that the military, and its accompanying industrial complex, exist to provide a (Constitutionally sound) defense of the entire country, it is the nation’s interests that are served.”
If you think that businesses exist for any other reason than to make a profit I have some nice beachfront property in Kansas I’d like to show you.

By: C M

C M — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 02:50:49 +0000

Semolina
You miss the point that people vote in blocs to protect themselves. City workers protect their economic well being through the political process in exactly the same way that other groups do. To pull one voting bloc out and say that it is somehow in the wrong for using the political process to promote its interests is to deny the very basics of why people vote at all. Let’s do a key poll of CEO’s and executives and see if they vote for deregulation, loose tax codes, and less rights for workers. Deriding one group among many is just plain old nonsense.

By: Foltz

Foltz — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 00:24:20 +0000

Paul,
My mistake in missing that you cited two different groups of people. I would like to know how large those differences and how those groups are defined before I toss too many comments into the fray. However, I will still contend that I would expect government wokers to be more likey to vote because they work in the system.

By: Jim S

Jim S — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 23:47:27 +0000

Semolina, the normal response from a company to anyone making noises about a union when there is no NLRB is to fire anyone involved. It sort of limits the ability to request negotiations.

By: Blind Mind's Eye

Blind Mind's Eye — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 19:32:49 +0000

The need to get rid of the public sector unions

In the Agora has a great post on public unions. I agree and would go farther by saying that the agenda should be to not only limit their power, but to outright destroy them. Think about this for a second,…

By: Semolina

Semolina — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 18:08:25 +0000

OK, it worked!
But the preview version sure does throw things off. What’s the point of a “preview” if you’re not previewing the actual post? One might as well just look at one’s words inside the comment writing box.
Best,
SP

By: Semolina

Semolina — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 18:05:55 +0000

Paul,
Using the “enter” key isn’t creating line breaks for me. At least not in the preview version. And because that’s what I see in the preview — a big glob of text — I’ve been going back in and adding code to assure that it posts with proper breaks.
OK, I’m gonna hit PREVIEW now and see how it looks.
Yep, the three paragraphs above appear as a single long paragraph in the preview. But I’ll hit POST this time, without any coding, to see how it appears on the public page.
Regarding the military stuff: I didn’t say there’s nothing to criticize. I just pointed out the flaw in the analogy provided by the other poster. Simply because one group “votes as a bloc” and another group “votes as a bloc” doesn’t mean they can both be targeted with the same form of criticism.
Best,
SP

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 17:51:14 +0000

Um, you can use the “enter” key, like everyone else.
And there’s a hell of a lot to criticize about the military and defense contractors. (Individual soldiers I leave out of my criticisms, because their benefits seem pretty commensurate in most respects with their sacrifice.) Aside from, say, TRW lying about missile defense tests, Boeing bribing Air Force officials, and so forth, there’s also the issue of a lack of management skills within the Pentagon, which manages to lose–not misspend, but misplace–billions annually.

By: Semolina

Semolina — Sun, 23 Jan 2005 17:46:19 +0000

"Its interests"? Considering that the military, and its accompanying industrial complex, exist to provide a (Constitutionally sound) defense of the entire country, it is the nation's interests that are served.

The office-clerk labor union down at city hall serves the interests of none but itself. It in fact harms the interest of the broader population, by artificially inflating prices and restricting the labor supply, for which the rest of us pay via taxes.

There is no conflict between freedom and providing for the common defense. There IS a conflict between freedom and government-mandated special privileges for one arbitrarily defined group of individuals. One protects rights; the other strips them away. There's nothing hero-worshipful about understanding the distinction.

OFF-TOPIC: Is there any way to write a legible post on this site without having to add frikkin HTML paragraph tags to create simple line breaks?