Budget Battle 2010: Or, Why I’m Not Sorry for Unions

Cross posted from Examiner.com

Over the last few months, anyone with a political inclination has been handed a rifle and filed into their respective trenches. We’ve passed talking about the issue a long, long time ago and now we’re left with the most violent of bloodless politics. While everyone talks about “the budget”, it’s not the budget that started the war: entrenched special interest did.

Budget cutting will always step on toes, but it wasn’t until the reforms started to outlaw public-sector unions that the hornets’ nest was truly stirred. That should be the first hint as to what lies at the heart of this conflict.

As far as special interests are concerned, unions are ten-ton gorillas, public unions even more so. Membership in Wisconsin is mandatory and so is the paying of dues. These dues are used to bend the political machine in their favor. Overtime pay is a great example of this. Instead of hiring more people or simply scheduling their employees properly, state institutions (especially prisons) will regularly shell out heavily for overtime pay. In 2010, overtime pay in the state reached $52.8 million. Lists are regularly published of employees who make over twice their base annual salary in overtime pay alone; simple guards and nurses making six-figure incomes. This is fiscal irresponsibility that can only be found in the public sector. This is a great reason why I’m not very broken up about the loss of collective bargaining rights for public employees.

The extreme backlash provoked by the disfranchisement of privlaged is exactly what Mancur Olson described in “The Rise and Decline of Nations”. Olson talks about how democracies slowly decline over time as they become more encrusted with special interest draining wealth and energy from taxpayers for their own personal benefit. As time goes on, these interests become so deeply rooted in the nation that it becomes impossible to root them out. Even if the reforms don’t stick over time, picking a fight with the public unions will be the last political act of Governor Walker. It’s the kind of political despair that only a student of Public Choice theory can truly appreciate.

Unions may be onerous leaches on the democratic political system, but Ross Kenyon writes that the issue of collective bargaining is more ambiguous then it seems. While the balance of power between the state and public unions may be a bit off, outlawing the unions overnight shifts the balance of power dangerously in the opposite direction.

There certainly are larger budgetary issues at stake (remember this is about the budget?) and there is no guarantee that the state won’t be heavy-handed towards its employees, but I find it hard to muster pity for their loss. These changes mostly affect workers in health and detention fields, both of which could do with a large dose of market competition. Instead of debating the proper way to regulate state monopolies, why don’t we question their existence in the first place?

Forging Truth

A colleague of mine recently wrote the following:

To me, liberty is not simply a political philosophy. It is my earnest attempt to bring people out of darkness, intellectually and spiritually. My advocacy of liberty is a call to the masses to reject all tyranny over the minds of men. This philosophy transcends questions of the scope of government. It is a cultural revolution, a rejection of ill-conceived prejudices and worn-out, anachronistic traditions that encourage ignorant conventions. This is a vision of a society far different from the one in which we share in today: one that operates on the premises of cooperation, tolerance, and rationality.

This surmises most of what makes me queasy with a portion of the libertarian movement. While we both reach the same conclusion, we do so through different means. Instead of being a question of efficient or even contented living, individual freedom becomes a means to “bring yourself out of the darkness, intellectually and spiritually”.

My biggest reason to opposing centralized force and control is because I don’t trust people. We all have darkness inside, a result from our fallen natures. The more power a given individual has over others, the more likely that they’ll do evil things to others. To borrow from C. S. Lewis, people who get into power tend to act like school-yard bullies. Even if they have the best intentions, they’re likely to a lot of harm before they’re done.

 Instead, others support economic and political freedom because it places the individual at the center of the epistemological universe. Man becomes an end to himself, and he’s set out to search for what those ends are. Subjectivity and post-modern “tolerance” reign.

The worshipers of the self would instantly object to me referring to a fallen nature. A priestess of this alter, Ayn Rand, took especial offence at the concept of original sin, calling it an affront to justice, and a removal of the will. She cannot stand the idea that evil might be in our natures and against our ability to change. This reveals a fundamental difference between Objectivism (and related philosophies) and Christianity.

The “spirituality” of individual freedom is a far cry from true spiritual freedom. To liberate oneself from reality is no liberation, but enslavement.  Spiritual freedom is not to create a god that best suits you, but to realize who God really is. Yet, this is not something we can do ourselves. There’s very little we can learn of God simply by watching sunsets. Instead, He must reveal himself to us. We’ll never hear His quiet, undemanding voice as long as we continue to place ourselves, our voices, first. A self-driven spirituality will ignore God as He is, and instead craft a false imagining serving us.  

The Freedom of Summer Afternoons

The campus becomes eerily empty every afternoon as classes wind down and students return to their concrete caves to recuperate and work on tomorrow’s hangover. The Reserve Officer Training Corp takes advantage of this and every Tuesday and Thursday they stand in neat little rows out in academic circle. They don grim faces and march behind their flags while a young man pretending to be R. Lee Ermey barks orders.

I ride my bike faster, now that the weight of classes has fallen from my shoulders. The approaching weekend shines past Friday’s remaining classes; they might as well not exist. Rock music in my ears, sun on my skin, and wind clutching at my clothes are the principle components of that exhilarating sensation known as freedom. But seeing those prospective soldier standing in formation with their cute matching uniforms makes me feel freer then a Friday afternoon ever could.

No, this isn’t some misguided sense of patriotic freedom, where the reverberations of ancient globe-spanning conflicts are used to color modern aggressions. It’s the feeling I get when I realize I can choose which clothes to wear, where I get to be at 1500 hours Tuesdays and Thursdays, and most importantly, what I spend my life doing after I graduate.

I can hear the angry dissent right now. Do not these brave students sacrifice themselves to protect my freedom to be young and disrespectful? I don’t hate freedom; I just don’t think we need so many guns and spies to have it. If I felt more threatened by a foreign power then the domestic one, it might be a different story. Perhaps I’ll write a well-researched essay on why militaries inevitably threaten freedom, compete with quotes from famous people everyone respects, but Working Man just started playing on my iPod, and there’s only a few more hours of sunlight left to enjoy. Hey, somebody has to have fun!