- The voters of Ohio voted to reinstate collective bargaining rights for government employee unions.
- The voters of Arizona recalled a Senator who introduced a law simply aimed at enforcing immigration laws already on the books.
- The voters in Georgia voted to increase their own taxes to reward spendthrift government education bureaucrats with billions of dollars more to spend.
OK … let’s stop here for a moment and consider government unions engaging in collective bargaining. Would you like to know two prominent people in American history who steadfastly opposed government union collective bargaining? That would be Franklin D. Roosevelt and labor giant George Meany, the former president of the AFL-CIO. That’s not to say these men didn’t support the growth of unions! Come on! FDR and George Meany? Of course they were pro-union. But they recognized that while private sector unions were bargaining for a share of the profits they produced through their work, government sector unions didn’t generate profits. They were merely negotiating for taxpayer money … negotiating with politicians they put in office with their campaign contributions and volunteer efforts on election day.
So now the uninformed and often flat-out ignorant voters of Ohio have handed these collective bargaining rights back to the government sector unions. They will not resume negotiations with the very officials they put into office for the money in the pockets of the people who gave them that power. The only way Ohio government entities will have to handle the rising costs will be to raise taxes, cut services or fire workers.
Yes --- I understand. The question on the ballot for Ohio voters was poorly worded. Worded, in fact, to favor the union organizers who got that question put on the ballot through a petition process. That doesn’t excuse the voters. This is their money, their economy, their future and the future of their children. They owed it to themselves and their children to become informed the issues. They didn’t. Ohio will suffer. They will suffer. Their children will suffer if they don’t get the hell out of Ohio and move to Wisconsin or some other state with right-to-work laws where government sector unions don’t have collective bargaining rights.Now .. the Georgia Voters. … BUT once again, as pretty much everybody knew they wood, these voters cast votes to raise their own taxes. But they had to do it, right? It was for the chilllllllllllldren. Spending on government education has increased by almost 400% since I Ggraduated. Per-pupil expenditures have increased from about $5,600 per pupil to almost $13,000. The administrator to teacher ratio used to be over two-to-one. Now it’s almost one-to-one. But school administrators and politicians knew they didn’t have to streamline their operations to reduce costs. They knew they didn’t have to get rid of the administrative bloat. They knew they didn’t need to stop building education palaces instead of schools. All they had to do was go to the voters and ask them to raise their own taxes …. For the chillllllldren. They did, and it worked.
Democracy is ugly. Majority rule can be a disaster. There is a reason our founding fathers thought it to be a good idea to limit who had the privilege (not the right) of going to the polls and selecting our leaders. There was a reason our founding fathers did not include a right to vote in a federal election – including voting for our president – in the constitution. They didn’t trust mobs. They didn’t want to see the “mindless whims of the masses” translated into law. They were right … but to no avail. Now the masses are taking their ignorance to the polls. We live in a country where over half of the people get some kind of a check from the government every month without working for it … and they vote. Now you tell me how we’re supposed to survive that.
