United Liberty

Michigan’s “Right to Work” debate has drawn attention to the whole idea of unions and where they fit in.  Unsurprisingly, I’m a supporter of right to work laws.  I’m also not a fan of unions as they are currently structured.  However, whether you are a fan or not doesn’t matter.  Anyone who values ideas like freedom should support right to work laws.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, “right to work” laws do not outlaw unions.  What they do is prevent a union from structuring things in such a way that workers have no choice but to join a union.  Unions claim these laws undermine their ability to collectively bargain.  I am certainly sympathetic to that, but not nearly enough to trump my reservations about what happens without these laws.

You see, union membership is never free.  Unions have employees who have to be paid, so they charge dues.  Dues aren’t unusual.  Most groups have some form of dues.  However, unions in non right to work states are basically telling people if they want to be employed, they must give over a portion of their paycheck to the unions.  There’s no choice in the matter.  If you want to work in those businesses, you have to pay.

Now, if someone told me that I had to pay to be employed, I’d consider that a crime.  They’re blocking my ability to earn a wage and support my family.  If it was a criminal organization, the FBI would be all over it with an investigation and probably very public arrests.  However, unions have been sacrosanct for quite some time.  As fellow United Liberty contributor Jeremy Kolassa put it:

Back in 2010, Tea Party protesters were accused of using racial slurs at African-American members of Congress — including Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), a civil rights-era hero. No proof of this was ever provided, of course. Yet, the accusation lived on in the media, with no actual video recording of the incident, despite a $10,000 reward offered by Andrew Breitbart.

So today, I saw this tweet on my feed:

BREAKING: Video evidence of Tea Partiers using racial epithets against Black Congressman: washingtonexaminer.com/article/251574…

— Miké (@ThePantau) December 12, 2012

Please click on the link and read through.

It appears that a hot dog vendor, Clint Tarver, who is an African-American, was hired to provide food to Americans for Prosperity — the same group who had their tent torn down by pro-union protesters in Lansing, Michigan yesterday. Apparently, these rabid union thugs weren’t too happy about this:

After destroying the Americans for Prosperity tent, where Tarver was catering hotdogs, the mob turned there attention to the hot dog cart.

Occupy Wall Street - what’s that?  They’ve gone away, right? They haven’t.  They’re regrouping and preparing to ramp up.  Nick Tomboulides, Andrew McCaughey, and Danielle Saul recorded some remarks made by Mike Golash, former President Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 689, and others at a OccupyDC meeting held August 19, 2012.

They are not hiding their goals anymore - and no matter what your stance on the current state of our government, what is being said here should shock all patriots.

GOLASH: Progressive labor is a revolutionary Communist organization.  Its objective is to make revolution in the United States, overthrow the capitalist system, and build communism.  We’re trying to learn something from the historical revolutions of the past, the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution, the revolutions in Cuba and Eastern Europe.

What can we learn from them so we can build a more successful movement to transform capitalist society?

The “historical revolutions of the past” don’t include the American Revolution - a revolution which created true freedom and prosperity and has been a model for such - but includes revolutions in which dictators were created who brutally tortured and slaughtered millions of their own people?

New York Mayor Michael “Ban the Big Gulp” Bloomberg is at it again.  This time, he’s voicing some ideas that are, quite frankly, beyond the idiocy he routinely spouts off.  This time, he told CNN’s Piers Morgan that he thinks police officers should go on strike until guns are outlawed.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told CNN’s Piers Morgan last night that he doesn’t “understand why police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say we’re going to go on strike, we’re not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe.”

First, Bloomberg is actually asking law enforcement officers - you know, the people who can actually arrest criminals, take them to jail, and all that - to go on strike to affect political change in this country?  Really? That’s just downright terrifying…if any police officers were willing to actually do it.

The reason that it’s scary is that many people obey laws simply because of a fear of going to prison.  If there are no police due to a strike, then that deterent is no longer there.  Welcome to downright anarchy.  Bloomberg isn’t a complete idiot, despite his comments.  He knows this.  What he’s basically asking is that police use extortion techniques on the American people to affect change in gun laws.  Extortion happens to be a crime that police arrest people for!

But I’m sure Mayor Bloomberg won’t let that stop him.

It seems a day doesn’t go by that I don’t see or hear someone complaining about jobs going overseas.  They invariably want the government to do something to keep jobs on American shores.  They blame “greedy corporations” for seeking profit and not looking out for the interests of Americans who desperately need jobs.

Well, those Americans really do need jobs, so here are some helpful tips to help bring those jobs back to American shores.

1. End the unions

Unions are a large chunk of the reason many companies have looked overseas for labor.  Unions, which once existed as a way to deal with abusive management, now seek to line pockets.  Not just theirs, but those of their members.  Through collective bargaining, they have jacked up wages for what are often unskilled positions to a point that borders on the ridiculous.  In some cases, that border is crossed.  Reports of auto workers with high school educations making six figure incomes while not filling any kind of management role are a prime example.

The thing is, non-union shops in the same industries often pay comperable wages.  They simply expect more work out of their employees, minimizing the number of people required.  Companies want the best workers they can get, and even without unions you won’t see wages plummet.  The best and brightest want to be compensated, and they will be.

However, if unions continue to push for more and more, then more and more companies will seek to move their operations overseas.

2. End the EPA

With nearly 100% of the precincts reporting this morning, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has survived the recall challenge, which engineered by Big Labor and state Democrats, against Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett by a healthy margin.

Here are the results:

• Walker (R): 53.2
• Barrett (D): 46.3%
• Trivedi (I): 0.6%

Some are saying that the race, given that Walker won by nearly 7 points, could put the state on the board this fall in the presidential election. There is certainly a measure of optimism for Republicans since this recall had such heavy implications. However, Republicans should be too hopeful since exit polling showed President Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney by 9 points.

The New York Times notes that, while outside spending was heavy in Wisconsin during the course of the race, nine out of every 10 voters had their minds made up by May 1st. Money is great if its on your side, but at some point voters probably started turning off their televisions because they were tired of seeing the flood of ads.

One of the most disturbing trends I’ve witnessed over these last few years is a coordinated attack from the left on the institutions and principles that make America great. Maybe nowhere has this been more evident than in the vitriol spewed by our eternal Campaigner-in-Chief and his dutiful Minions of Social Justice, all bemoaning the evils of capitalism, and the inequity of wealth distribution (although oddly, their desire for more equal distribution does not extend to income taxes, where the top one percent earn 19% of the income and pay 40% of all income taxes, while the bottom fifty percent that pay exactly zero).

Obama has set so many straw men on fire that he’s now the leading cause of global warming. He accused doctors of slicing out tonsils and amputating limbs just to bill a few more dollars to insurance companies. He’s accused business owners of not caring about their employees and only about their company’s bottom line. He accused the Chamber of Commerce, without proof, of using foreign money to buy elections. His NLRB threatened Boeing for opening a new, billion dollar plant in right-to-work South Carolina, and his wife urged young students not to go into the corporate world, but rather “work for the community” like her community organizer husband, as if bringing valued goods and services and the accompanying jobs and wealth into the community was not a worthwhile endeavor.

When did we reach the point where we extol the timid and the parasitic? Where wealth creation was bad, and the American Dream had been supplanted by a desire for European-style social welfare? We don’t even have to look back in history to see what a nightmare this is; we just have to turn on the news. The Greeks are rioting in the streets at the thought of giving up an ounce of their lavish social welfare benefits, and the European Union is at the brink of collapse as it struggles under the weight of its debt driven by these welfare state policies.

If you listen to the media, Tuesday’s election were a mixed bag nationally and a disaster for Republican the ever crucial swing state of Ohio due to voters overturning limitations placed on collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers, which was passed by the legislature earlier this year.

Democrats and labor unions raised some $30 million trying to defeat the effort. Passage of the referendum is certainly bad news for Ohio taxpayers, who will no doubt be hit with the ever-expanding costs of public-sector salaries and benefits.

What has gone under-reported is that Ohioans voted overwhemling against the individiual mandate, a central piece of ObamaCare, by supporting a separate ballot measure:

Voters in Ohio approved a measure Tuesday night disapproving of President Obama’s healthcare law.

Mitt Romney, who many believe is the inevitable Republican nominee, just keeps burning bridges with conservatives. We’ve explained them here over the course of the last year, so there is no need to go back over them.

But with labor unions becoming a target for many conservatives, and rightfully so, after the reasonable measures pushed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker earlier this year and the Boeing debacle in South Carolina, it’s an incredibly dumb move to snub the party’s base. Yet Romney did just that yesterday by declining to endorse or even give a position on a ballot measure in Ohio that would limit the collective bargaining rights of public-sector workers:

Mitt Romney stopped in Ohio today, where polls show him competitive with Herman Cain in the March 2012 primary. He stopped by a Republican phone bank where volunteers were drumming up support for two ballot measures — one of them a national cause celebre for the left. Issue 2, if passed, would affirm the collective bargaining reform Republicans pushed through this year. The measure is on the ballot because unions want to beat it, and overturn the law, and polling suggests that they can. Issue 3, if passed, would prevent Ohio from participating in any health care mandate — federal, state, whatever.

Romney was at one of the nerve centers for the campaign to pass the Issues. CNN’s Peter Hamby asked a simple question: Did he support them?

The protests in Wisconsin against Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal that would require public-sector workers to pay more for benefits and pensions, though they’ll still be better off than private-sector workers, and reforms that would limit collective bargaining by public-sector unions are still receiving an incredible amount of attention.

In case you haven’t seen it, here is video a speech Gov. Walker gave last night explaining the reasons for the proposal. You can read the transcript here:

Walker, who has been falsely accused of favoring certain public-sector unions, has warned that unless the measures are passed to help ensure that the $3 billion budget deficit over the next two years can be cut, 6,000 public workers could lose their jobs.