Let's examine the domestic labor issue. I personally think Unions are important. When the workplace was a deathtrap and injury meant termination, unions helped create a safe workplace and guarantee an injured worker gets compensated for the injury. Unions helped create the great middle class and despite rampant corruption actually worked to benefit the workers. At that time and until post WWII, there were no public sector unions. But union organizers, always interested in power, saw a vast untapped resource. As private sector unions were diminishing primarily because hi-tech companies offered better working conditions, benefits and pay, the unions had to turn somewhere to find a force of dues payers. As the government hired more and more minority workers in programs that seemed more like work-fare than welfare, unions saw a great opportunity to add them to their power base. After all, government work was always considered relatively low pay in relation to the private sector but this was offset with good benefits. As soon as the unions got involved, pay started raising as did benefits and holidays. It has slowly turned into a condition where unionized government workers earn far more then the population of private workers who support them. In essence, we have turned and are still turning into a society where more people work for the government than work in the private sector and not one of those people produce a single good or product that can be sold. Their whole task is to regulate and control the free market in some way.
To continue this model, the government has looted Social Security and issued billions in bonds. The reason? The private sector does not earn enough to support the ever growing government.
Practices instituted by union negotiators have hamstrung elected officials. But most of these officials have come from the public sector in some way. So the officials doing the negotiating have little interest in restricting the benefits and salary of their friends. We have a situation where we have developed a 'government class' every bit as self oriented as the Communist party 'class' that developed under the Soviet system.
My wife and I attend a party to celebrate a local author. The party was at a local county officer's house and everyone there was not only a member of the government but a member of the Democratic party. I was the only oddball. My wife is in a teacher's union. I asked around and everyone had some kind of county or city job and even low paying jobs were paying more than I had ever made in the private sector where my highest salary was $73K per year. Low level office workers in our county were making more than teachers who were making between $45K and $70K. I ran into a person who worked for the local parks and on investigation found that this guy earned over $100K per year. Where have we gone wrong when a person who takes care of parks makes that kind of salary? Those lawns must be pretty green.
But we have let the unionization of the public sector completely disenfranchise the private sector worker. Make no mistake, a private sector union has very little relation to a public sector union. For unions to do well, the private sector must make money which means that the workers have to work hard to keep the company profitable so they can petition for higher wages or better benefits. The same isn't true of any public sector worker. Since public sector workers do not have to do anything but what they are told, there is no way they can excel and be promoted. This is because the unions have set out a course where that kind of behavior is discouraged.
I have friends who live in Europe. I asked them about the differences between society in France and Denmark, Italy, and other places, and here. What I heard most was that in France, say, one was expected to stay in one's place and not try to excel above their peers. To be successful meant changing one's circle of acquaintances because it was considered socially "bad" to try and move above the status and economic level of your friends in general. I heard this over and over and people who were entrepreneurs were looking for ways to move to countries that were move friendly towards business in general. Some were starting businesses in China. There are Americans who are also starting businesses in China. What could be wrong with starting a business in America or Europe that made it attractive to start a business in China? Could the situation exist where we have put so many restrictions on businesses that we have killed the entrepreneurial spirit? Are we devolving into a mind set where production is unimportant but working for the regulators is the goal? What would this do to America's competitiveness in the global market place?
What has happened to us as a nation and what must change so we can again be economic and production leaders in the world?
Remember, Robert Goddard invented the liquid fuel rocket here but couldn't get it developed. When we captured German rocket engineers and asked them where they got the ideas they used, they said Robert Goddard. We have recently abrogated our position as leaders in space. NASA is now involved in social programs to make Muslims feel better about their contribution to science in general. I have a friend who is an active Democrat. When I said I thought it was a disaster to defund NASA and allow other countries to catch up or even surpass our efforts, he said, "So what? I could care less about space or any space program. We should trash it all."
H. G. Wells wrote a story called "The Shape of Things To Come." This was remade into a movie called "Things to Come" in 1936. In this movie, there is an effort to launch a space vehicle but there are lots of protests against it for any number of reasons. Raymond Massey played one ofthe people behind the space exploration effort and he made a speech that I still remember the gist of today. He basically said that man must constantly move forward and explore regardless of the cost. It was the nature of man to do so and one of the reasons humankind ruled the planet. To fail to do so, he said, was to stop the whole force of evolution and sink back into the mud and slime from which we arose.
It's a pretty elegant argument. Does this apply to our current state of affairs? Is is more important to redistribute wealth so everyone has it the same or use that wealth to develop new ways for the society to continue? All over the world we have examples of societies who destroyed themselves and just walked away. There are number of reasons given for this behavior but one wonders if they just lost impetus to keep moving forward, subsequently stagnated and later collapsed.
Again I ask: "What Is Going On Here?"
FB
