Today's Robber Barons

Police are not in the business of preventing crime any more than social workers are interested in ending poverty.  As "The Beholden State" illustrates, they simply have no incentive to do it.  Both groups are government bureaucracies represented by collective bargaining agencies.  As such, they rely on increasing demand for their services each fiscal year.  They also rely on affirmative action set asides, quotas, threats of disparate impact lawsuits, and political payoffs to special interests to force employers to increase numbers of poorly qualified workers to compensate for inefficiencies created by abandoning merit hiring and promotion. 

This featherbedding artificially bloats the numbers of people who contribute to public employee bargaining agencies, which in turn, increases the amount of money available for political action committees to money-launder cash back to the very politicians who enforce and expand the bureaucrats’ ability to extort money from taxpayers through collective bargaining.  Let us examine this scenario.

Crooked politicians gave the collectivists a monopoly on supplying labor to taxpayers.  Since there is no alternative source competing to supply the public, they can command exorbitant prices for inferior goods and services.  Taxpayers have no recourse because the people responsible for protecting their interests depend upon money for re-election from the people who are robbing them.  Public employee collective bargaining agencies are today’s Robber Barons; only, it is not monopolies' control of salt, petroleum, or railroads.  The modern hustle forces taxpayers to purchase the labor necessary for the wheels of government to turn from greedy, corrupt, and violent middlemen.

In return, these intermediaries give political and economic support to their hirelings in government.  The complicit executive and legislative branches of government have been staffing the judicial branch with compliant lawyers-in-black-robes who eschew the rule of law and ignore the federal Constitution to decide cases on political expedience.  They and their regulators have prevented Boeing from opening a $1 billion plant in South Carolina.  They are instituting Card Check to end the time honored secret ballot so that union thugs can learn which employees’ cars to vandalize and where to send intimidating messages.

We can procrastinate no longer.  All of us who are weary of carrying on our backs corrupt politicians and their greedy public worker cohorts should take heart.  In just over one year, we can finish the job begun in 2010 and send them a message.  In the words of Kerosene Maxine Waters, “You can go straight to h-e-double hockey sticks.”

May your gods be with you.