I'm Not Anti-Union Per Se

But, as a retired federal bureaucrat, I need to say that I’ve always opposed government employee unions. To see the problems that are inevitably created by the political power of such unions—created to a great degree by the irresponsible government expansion of government employment, accompanied by off shoring of our real economy and creation of the great Wall Street Casino for the benefit of the Ruling Class, I offer this eye opening article:

One big reason Chicago Public Schools is facing a billion-dollar deficit

What’s behind the latest Chicago Public Schools mess is simple, and not surprising. CPS spent its temporary covid money on permanent costs, namely salaries and benefits, and that covid money has finally run out. Now the district’s back to facing potential billion-dollar deficits, credit-rating concerns, and political chaos, largely due to an irresponsible covid-era hiring spree.

What began with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s demand that CPS CEO Pedro Martinez take out a $300 million payday loan to paper over deficits has morphed into a train wreck. 

Johnson called for Martinez to resign after Martinez refused to borrow the money. Then the entire school board quit in protest of the mayor’s hardball efforts. Now the CTU is screaming at everyone involved to demand $1 billion from the state, while Martinez wants Johnson to raid the city’s TIFs funds to help bailout CPS. And Moody’s, watching this all play out, has warned that more cash flow problems would be a “credit negative” for the district. 

What’s funny in all of this is that nobody is pointing out the root cause of this current chaos. The district went on a covid-era 25% hiring spree, adding more than 9,000 staff since 2019, even as enrollment dropped by 10% (a loss of more than 37,000 students).

There’s more at the link, but I can’t resist these graphics. Every picture tells a story, and these are pictures of a trainwreck. That’s democracy for you. Who expects voters to vote for sensible governance?

I was going to “quote” Alexis de Tocqueville at this point. However, Wikiquote has a list of false quotes attributed to Tocqueville, which I excerpt. Some of the quotes are fakes, some are misattributed—but I like ‘em all:

• It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.

  • P. J. O'Rourke, Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut‎ (1996), p. 227.

• The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

  • This is a variant expression of a sentiment which is often attributed to Tocqueville or Alexander Fraser Tytler, but the earliest known occurrence is as an unsourced attribution to Tytler in "This is the Hard Core of Freedom" by Elmer T. Peterson in The Daily Oklahoman (9 December 1951): "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."

  • Variant: The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.

• In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.

  • It was Joseph de Maistre who wrote in 1811 "Every nation gets the government it deserves."

• A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office.

  • It was John Innes Clark Hare in his book "American Constitutional Law - Volume 1" who claimed that this was from Toqueville in an unsourced paraphrase that started with "It was long since remarked by De Tocqueville..." Actual quote, from Toqueville's Democracy In America, Chapter VII: "When the American republics begin to degenerate it will be easy to verify the truth of this observation, by remarking whether the number of political impeachments augments."