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November 03, 2005
Paper Tigers and Bogeymen
Steven Malanga, in "The Conspiracy Against the Taxpayers" seems to think that the crushing municipal and state pension obligations due to teachers, firemen, and various government functionaries have been forced on an unwitting public. I disagree.
In a perfect world, maybe taxpayers would have demanded fairness from the beginning, but this is not a perfect world, and we are not perfect individuals. Sadly, all taxpayers are complicit in the long history of simply paying off workers in the public sector. Teachers unions may be powerful, but so is the pervasive fear among parents of teacher quality (which, sadly can lead parents to support higher teacher salaries even as they agitate for the right to remove inferior teachers from the classroom).
Despite the many flaws of taxpayers, and the nearly crushing burdens (well summarized in Steven Malanga's article) of our long-standing willingness to bribe the public sector, a simple truth remains: the unions are dying. The greater the discrepancy between the benefits and security afforded public sector vs. private sector employees, the harder it will be to justify those differences. Taxpayers are only now beginning to feel the true weight of our collective largess to the public sector, and as the scope of the obligations becomes clear, we will find a way to relieve ourselves of these burdens or punish the organizations that championed them, or both.
Steven Malanga needs to calm down, he is awed by the strength of paper tigers, and frightened by union bogeymen.
Posted by Audi Partem Alteram at November 3, 2005 01:13 AM
