Thank You

Thank you for supporting Nexus of Power. Please check out my new blog "Full Asylum" at http://fullasylum.blogspot.com

Sorry, Tea Party - I'm not with you on this one

The two sides faced each other like opposing armies. In front of the Massachusetts State House, union members in hard hats and their moonbat sympathizers in knits demonstrated their opposition to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The Governor is pushing legislation to strip Badger State public workers of their right to bargain collectively for benefits. Across Beacon Street, in front of the Boston Common, the Tea Party held a counter-rally, the yellow Gadsden flag flying proudly above them with its motto “Don’t Tread on Me”.

The responsibilities of earning a living kept me away from Beacon Hill last Tuesday. Had I been there however, I would not have been in my usual place with the Tea Party. Instead, my views on the issue would have placed me right in the middle of Beacon Street, a vantage point where I could address both sides, at least until I got hit by a car. Here’s what I would have said, both to those who were on Beacon Hill, and those who were not:

To Labor, Public and Private: You’re trying to get the best possible pay and benefits you can, in order to make a better life for yourselves and your families. Good for you.

To Management: You’re trying to give labor the lowest pay and benefits you can, in order to get a better deal for the shareholders and taxpayers you represent. I hope they recognize your efforts and reward you.

So now you in Labor and you in Management must somehow come to an agreement. Use every means at your disposal to come out ahead: negotiate, strike, picket, lock out the union, fire its members, hire scab labor, appeal to public opinion, vilify the other side. But stop short of fraud and violence.

In a free market, you would confront each other on a level playing field. Unfortunately, a level playing field is not what we have in this country. In the private sector, the 1935 Wagner Act requires employers to engage in collective bargaining, thereby tilting the playing field in favor of the unions. To Congress: Repeal the Wagner Act and restore the balance between labor and management in the private sector.

To Governor Walker: You got a rough gig. Just a few weeks in office and you’re tasked with closing a $3.6 billion dollar budget deficit. You have my sympathy. Press the public sector unions for every concession you can get at the negotiating table. But the Budget Repair Bill that you are supporting is an attempt to tilt the playing field in favor of management before you get to the negotiating table. It is every bit as egregious as the Wagner Act.

To my friends in the Tea Party: I love you all, but we got together because of our mutual interest in freedom and capitalism. That sometimes has to include freedom for people with whom we disagree. For a state to pass a law dictating to its employees how they may conduct their contract negotiations is an assault on their freedom and a distortion of the market.

To the union thug who knocked down Massachusetts Congressional Candidate Marty Lamb: see above, re: violence. You should be in jail.

To the doctors who set up a booth at the Wisconsin State Capitol to write fake sick notes excusing union supporters from work: you issued medical judgments for patients you did not examine. See above, re: fraud. I’d say you should lose your medical licenses, but I don’t believe in them.

To the pro-union protestors on Beacon Hill: 1) You need a more imaginative chant than “Union! Union! Union!”

2) You left a mess behind. Flyers, placards, and paper cups littered the capitol steps after you left. The Tea Party side of the street was spotless as usual. Follow their example and clean up after yourselves!

To Tom Meyer (I hope I got your name right), the Tea Party supporter who stayed after dark to clean up the union side of the street: thanks for making our city a better place.

To Austin Hess: Thanks for pulling together all the great video of the dueling rallies on your blog, Uncommon Sense. Next best thing to being there.

No Point to Unionize

On a recent Facebook thread about events in Wisconsin, one of my friends argued that even though only 11.9% of U.S. workers belong to unions, workers at non-union companies also benefit from increased wages. Uncertain about that, I consulted Professor James Feigenbaum of the Economics and Finance Department at Utah State University. Here’s what he said:

“The standard answer assumes that the companies and workers are otherwise equal. If the union restricts who can be employed at a company, that will reduce employment at the unionized company and increase wages. This, in turn, will increase the supply available at other companies, increasing their employment at the cost of lower wages.

“However, in my experience, unionized companies and non-unionized companies are not the same. On my parents' street, there are two supermarkets: a Wegman's, which is non-union, and a Tops, which is union. For a long time you would see the union guys go picket at Wegman's, which was ridiculous because wages and benefits were better at Wegman's. But Wegman's is one of the best managed stores in the country. Tops is not. Since a union can discourage good workers from going to a business, that can reduce wages at the business.

“In the modern era, though, there is really no point for workers to unionize except in rare instances when the employer is the only one buying their services. Professional athletes unionize because there is only one major league for each sport in the US. Graduate students have an incentive to unionize because they can't easily switch to another university without disrupting their progress toward a degree. Professors, on the other hand, have no incentive to unionize because they can easily switch to another university. Government employees unionize because there is only one government. Auto workers, meanwhile, have undoubtedly hurt themselves by unionizing. In the short run, they may have gotten higher wages, but in the long run they have made their employers less profitable.”

Putting the Party in Tea Party

November 1, 2010: Tea Party Express rolls into Worcester for a pre-election rally...

The next day...

House: +60

Senate: +6

Party like it's 2010!

Vote for Freedom Tomorrow

“Sometimes when you have a lead, people get complacent. Don’t get complacent. Don’t give up. Keep pushing. Make the win as big as possible. The bigger it is, the bigger message it sends.” – Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Campaign Stop for Kelly Ayotte, October 30, 2010

You all know how important this election is for restoring freedom in America. Please vote tomorrow!

What this Election is About

"This is the issue in this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves" – Ronald Reagan, Speech in support of Barry Goldwater, 1964

“The two ideas of human freedom and economic freedom working together came to their greatest fruition in the United States. Those ideas are still very much with us. We are all of us imbued with them. They are part of the very fabric of our being. But we have been straying from them. We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else. We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good purposes.

“Fortunately, we are waking up. We are again recognizing the dangers of an overgoverned society, coming to understand that good objectives can not be perverted by bad means, that reliance on the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.

“Fortunately, also, we are as a people still free to choose which way we should go – whether to continue along the road we have been following to ever bigger government, or to call a halt and change direction.” - Milton Friedman, Free to Choose, 1979

“Back in 1927 an American Socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket said the American people would never vote for Socialism, but under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program…

“If you don’t [oppose the government takeover of healthcare] this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other Federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day…we will awake to find that we have Socialism. And if you don’t do this, and I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” – Ronald Reagan, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine”, 1961

“The West has come to regard the values of freedom – the yardstick of human rights – as something Western. Many of them, especially in Europe, take the values and the institutions of freedom – the institutions of science, freedom, curiosity, the individual – I mean the rule of law, they've come to take them so for granted that they're either not aware of the threat against it, they're not aware of the fact that you have to sustain day be day, as is with all man-made things. I mean if this building, the roof will leak and the paint will fall and you have to repaint it, you have to maintain it all the time. It seems that people have forgotten that. And perhaps part of the reason is because the generation that's now enjoying all these freedoms in the West is not the generation that built it. These are generations that inherited it. And like companies, family companies often you'll see, for those of you who are interested in economics, the first generation and the second generation are almost always more passionate about the brand and the family company and keeping it all in the family; and then the third generation live, use, take the money and they're either overtaken by bigger companies, swallowed up, or they go bankrupt; and I think that there is an analogy there in that the generations after the Second World War living today in Europe – the United States may be different but I'm here much too short to say anything about that – is that they are people who are so complacent, they've always been free – they just no longer know what freedom costs.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 2007

“You know what I think the Tea Party is all about. These people are angry, these people are frustrated, and these people are upset, because they believe that this Obama administration is taking their freedom away, taking their liberty away. We don’t let anybody do that.” – Rudy Giuliani, Campaign Stop for Kelly Ayotte, 2010

“Freedom doesn't come like a bird on the wing
It doesn't come down like the summer rain
Freedom, freedom is a hard won thing
You've got to work for it, fight for it
Day and night for it
And every generation got to win it again” – Pass It On, old Trade Union Song

The Don Rickles Presidency

I wrapped up my blog yesterday with a comment about our tough, smart senior citizens. Case in point: The King of Insult, Comedian Don Rickles, age 84. Last month he appeared on the Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson, where he insulted Mr. Ferguson (“He’s a lonely guy”), Mr. Ferguson’s Scottish homeland (“Have you been over there?” “No…we like to go to places where we can have fun”), Frank Sinatra (“got lucky”), and an elderly man in the audience (“You can always tell when they get old cause the mouth can’t close. Dad you gotta keep the mouth closed. Otherwise they come at you with the hook and you’re in a box.”). If none of that seems funny when you read it on the computer screen, you got to watch the video. The audience laughs for thirteen minutes straight.

Clearly Mr. Rickles is a role model for those who never want to retire. Unfortunately, he also seems to be a role model for President Obama. The President has developed an insult routine of his own, and he’s taking his act on the road. In San Francisco he told a fundraiser that rural Pennsylvanians “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” (Audio: Barack Obama's small town guns and religion comments, April 6, 2008). In Boston, he said that those of us who are so eager to eject his allies from Congress are not thinking "clearly" because we're "scared". We can't help it though; we're "hard-wired" that way (Remarks by the President at DSCC Fundraiser, October 16, 2010). In Portland, Maine, shortly after the passage of ObamaCare, he ridiculed those concerned about its provisions: “After I signed the bill, I looked around. I looked up at the sky to see if asteroids were coming. I looked at the ground to see if cracks had opened up in the earth. You know what, it turned out it was a pretty nice day. Birds were still chirping. Folks were strolling down the street. Nobody had lost their doctor. Nobody had pulled the plug on Granny. Nobody was being dragged away to be forced into some government-run health care plan.” ( Remarks by the President on Health Insurance Reform, April 1, 2010).

Politics ain’t beanbag. Those who run for office, pontificate on TV, or even write a blog choose to put themselves out there. They’re fair game for comedy. But it’s not good leadership, and it’s not right, to ridicule average Americans for going to Church, wanting good health care for their families, and worrying about the direction of our country. I’ve been following politics for some years now and this is the first time I can remember a President of the United States doing so routinely and publicly. Richard Nixon did refer to anti-war protestors as “bums”, but that was a one-off incident. (How’s that for insult humor – accusing someone of having less grace than Richard Nixon?)

Although Mr. Obama and Mr. Rickles have embraced the same form of comedy, there is an important difference between them. Don Rickles actually has affection for the targets of his insults. You can see that in the Craig Ferguson video. He might have told Mr. Ferguson, “I don’t like you. I never liked you.” But he wrapped up with “May God be good to you and your lovely wife. I mean it from my heart. You are indeed a gentleman and a great deal of class.” There is a reason that Don Rickles is called “Mr. Warmth”. Even when he is making fun of his own wife of forty-five years, you can tell that she’s the one who keeps him grounded.

I doubt President Obama has warm feelings for the targets of his contempt because, as a liberal, contempt is what he really feels. Liberalism is based on the notion that average members of the public like us are too busy, too greedy, or just too plain stupid to make decisions about choosing an insurance plan, investing for retirement, or buying a light bulb. It is therefore necessary for enlightened individuals, such as Mr. Obama, to make those decisions for us, and, if we resist, use the full force of the United States Government to impose them on us. (If you think that is a good philosophy of governance, vote Democrat on November 2.)

There’s one other important difference between Mr. Obama and Mr. Rickles. It cuts to the heart of why Mr. Rickles has been so successful as a comedian and Mr. Obama is doomed to failure. The difference is that Mr. Rickles is funny. Again, you got to watch that video. And let's help Mr. Obama retire before Mr. Rickles.