I’ve been watching, with a vested interest I must add, to the “collective bargaining” legislation that has worked its way through the State Houses of Wisconsin and Ohio and is now the law of both lands. My interest comes from my not-so-unusual circumstance of having a family full of educators and teachers. I myself took a turn at that role and found it both harder than I ever knew and more rewarding than I ever knew. To be fair, I know very few people who do not have a teacher or an educator very near them on their family tree. I am against these laws, specifically Senate Bill 5 which applies to me in Ohio. I am not opposed to the law because of my family, however. I am opposed to any law which decides it can unilaterally determine that a contract bargained for in good faith can be opened and cancelled by the State, in any fashion.
Actually, any contract that can be altered when one party feels it isn’t fair anymore is a problem. It is simply more egregious when your own government does it to you. I emphasized the work “anymore” because both parties felt the contracts in question were perfectly fine when the ink was first dry on the agreements. It simply got a little tough for the State and now we have to hear the whining. I wonder what the State Authority would have said if the economy boomed and the Union said, “Hey, Govna! We need to open the contracts NOW and get some more bennies for the teachers!” One second thought, I don’t wonder what the State would have said. Their response would most likely have been something that would have gotten a student a detention or two. The time and place to negotiate for better pricing is at the end of the existing agreement. Changes must be made and that is the cold reality of today’s recessionary environment. BUT, they need to be made fairly and at the time both parties negotiated when their respective agreement were made. When any of us find that it has become ok for the State Authority to intrude so dramatically into our lives, we must all question the power we have acquiesced back to those whom we were never supposed to give it to in the first place.
Actually, any contract that can be altered when one party feels it isn’t fair anymore is a problem. It is simply more egregious when your own government does it to you. I emphasized the work “anymore” because both parties felt the contracts in question were perfectly fine when the ink was first dry on the agreements. It simply got a little tough for the State and now we have to hear the whining. I wonder what the State Authority would have said if the economy boomed and the Union said, “Hey, Govna! We need to open the contracts NOW and get some more bennies for the teachers!” One second thought, I don’t wonder what the State would have said. Their response would most likely have been something that would have gotten a student a detention or two. The time and place to negotiate for better pricing is at the end of the existing agreement. Changes must be made and that is the cold reality of today’s recessionary environment. BUT, they need to be made fairly and at the time both parties negotiated when their respective agreement were made. When any of us find that it has become ok for the State Authority to intrude so dramatically into our lives, we must all question the power we have acquiesced back to those whom we were never supposed to give it to in the first place.
Oh, but I digress. These arguments are old and worn. They will be settled in a sure November vote to remand SB5.
My argument is different. I think the Governor and his supporters are simply pissed-off home owners who don’t like the value of their house anymore, want to find a better one at someone else’s expense, and strategically default. Why live up your responsibility; that is so yesterday. In the end, just as those who give their house back because it is possible to have someone else (with the capability to absorb it) take the loss on your home because you need a better home, SB5 is a socialist response. Aghast! How can that possibly be? SB5 is a conservative call to balance our budget and to make use of tax-payer dollars responsibly. “We simply cannot afford to continue down the path of Status Quo”. SB5 is a damn good example of “throwing out the baby with the bath water”.
Let’s take a side trip down the road of Socialism (or, Marxism or Obamaism…whatever your BS flavor of the day is). Socialism is a term that has readily rested on the tongues of the conservative movement and is doled out in astonishing regularity unless it deals with subsidies for oil or ethanol or fracking in NE Ohio and Western PA. Socialism is the accusation of any idea not borne of a GOP proposal. ObamaCare is socialist because it forces people to buy subsidized health insurance from private companies. Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan, ironically, is not socialist even though it will force the elderly to buy insurance from private companies with a government subsidy. Excuse me?
As a Socialist, you would believe in the greater good of an economically equaled society. A society where all are given what they need to survive and are asked to provide as much as they are capable. If you lack on one side of the Need-Capable equation you will make it up on the other. I would do very well in this society because I am a needy person – but I’m not sure backrubs are in the Manifesto that Karl Marx penned. Seriously, I would do ok. I have five children and would require much more of you than you would of me. They all NEED an education, and shoes, and clothes, and milk, and food, and water and heat. YOU already have an education so your money can go to my kids. THANK YOU!!! How do you do this; how do you determine need and capability? How do you determine how much milk each child gets, or who gets what education, or how much money I need to keep in order to purchase all of those shoes? What I “need” starts with wages and ends with goods and services. Let us start, then, at the start. The Yale University (you know them, the American-destroying-liberal-breeding-ground-for-socialist-brainwashing that graduated such societal leeches as Presidents Taft, Ford, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II <sarcasm!!!>) published paper #761 from its Economic Growth Center “Papers” series in 1996 entitled (you’ll just love this): “Wage and Price Control Policies in Socialist Transitional Economies”. In that paper, the theory is presented that economies trending towards socialism by deliberate or evolutionary means begin to implement the Need-Capability model early on with efforts towards wage control. No one needs to make more than X. Based on an outsider’s arbitrary conclusion on what you need to make, we will assign your wage. We, the implementers, will often make more than you – but we probably need to and most certainly don’t find it is appropriate for you to tell us otherwise.
Back to the future: SB5. We, the State Authority (say “implementer”), find that you (say: “unionized teacher”) are making more than you need to make. Therefore, we will post your salary in public places to drive discontent, decry your socialist anti-capitalist union as raping the taxpayer, make references to the status quo, and pass a bill that will limit your compensation (say “control your wages”) to an amount we feel is appropriate, and rescind your legal right to bargain for a contract, and finally tear up the existing contract you have today and consider no longer legal. Your benefit will be determined by us. That, my dear readers, is socialism through and through. Good 'ole Marxism served with a nice silver spoon full of faux conservatism. Enjoy!
This is the deal: We need an educated citizenry – not for today, for tomorrow. We need to continue providing for the ideas that Gates, Jobs, Ford, Rockefeller can provide. Those men were provided a sound basis of knowledge and desire to succeed in no small part to their education, given to them freely by teachers. Economically, educators are a cost of goods sold (COGS) on the income statement. Where would your widget be without its components? What physicist found fame picking his nose? Name a single pilot that describes the concept of flight using words like “wings go flappy, flappy then you go high and far”. For America to be intellectually profitable, we need to be intellectual. What we don’t need are socialists clothed in the garb of conservative capitalists who feel the need to cut pay and cap benefits, to disregard the foundation of a free market, the contract. We do not need those who have risen to the very height of this States’ (or any States’) political ladder using the very education and teachers that they are now willing to cut to satisfy a short-term desire. At this point, all I can say is that it is damn good we have few new or expanding industries in the US because we will soon have few educated people to fill the needs of those industries. Our new “service based” economy won’t require any of that fan-dangled knowledge that competent and engaged teachers can provide.
Maybe this will sound a little clearer: “if flappy-flappy does not work, big metal bird go bang on ground.” The US will not soar to new heights or take this country higher and further into the worlds’ future with an uneducated workforce or an uninterested workforce of educators. We can all be passengers on a plane flown by Japanese, Chinese, German and Russian pilots. Me, I’m sitting in the exit row so I can escape. By the way, when this plane makes its first dive towards the earth, you can put on your own oxygen masks. I’m capable of helping you and educated enough to understand how to do it, but feel you should find the ambition, desire and instinctive need to do it yourself.
(C) Paul Hugenberg, 2011
May be redistributed with proper credit to the author and citation of this blog address.
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