Bookworm Room

Actually, there are only three reasons here why public sector employment is killing the economy.  I’m sure that, all of us working together, could think of many more reasons:

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Here’s a list of the biggest spenders in California politics for the past decade: These 15 groups spent more than a combined $1 billion over the past 10 years to influence public policy: – California Teachers Association: $211.8 million – California State Council of Service Employees: $107.4 million – Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America: [...]

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There are some things that seem immutable, right until a collapse that, in 20/20 hindsight, seemed inevitable.  Just think of the Iranian Revolution, the Fall of the Berlin wall and . . . the SEIU? For some time, the Service Employees International Union has appeared to be a permanent fixture on the political and economic [...]

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Here’s a beautiful matched set: The first part of the set is Daniel Henninger’s truly brilliant article about the way in which President Kennedy’s 1962 executive order allowing federal workers to unionize “transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.”  Henninger thinks this dependency broke down yesterday in Massachusetts. The second part of the set [...]

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This is a portmanteau post, filled with interesting things I read today, some of which come in neatly matched sets. Opening today’s San Francisco Moronicle, the first thing I saw was that an illegal teen’s arrest is causing a stir in San Francisco’s halls of power.  You see, San Francisco is a sanctuary city, and [...]

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One of my main bases for hostility to teacher’s unions is that increasingly have nothing to do with their original goal, which was ensuring a living wage and decent working conditions for teachers.  (Not that they were always that effective at serving their original union mandate.  My father was a teacher and he did belong [...]

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I frequently read that the White House is dancing the to the various unions’ tunes because, as the saying goes, you “dance with them what brung you.”  In other words, it was union money that helped (in a large way) to pay for Obama’s victory, and now the White House is returning the favor.  The [...]

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This morning Mr. Bookworm offered me something:  “Hey!  You want to blog about something Obama’s doing that I don’t like?” I was curious.  “What?” “This Employee Free Choice Act.  What’s up with that?” “That’s been around for a while,” I said.  “It’s one of the platforms on which Obama ran.” He asked, “What do you [...]

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I’m ambivalent about unions.  When they first arose as a real market force at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, I believe they were a necessary counterbalance to industries that (a) had unlimited power in the employment market place and (b) that abused that power something awful. I started turning [...]

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I think unions were an absolute necessity in the early days of the industrial revolution.  Workers were so spectacularly abused in those days, in part because they had limited mobility when it came to looking for greener employment pastures, that only by united action were they able to change the employer/employee dynamic away from mind-bogglingly [...]

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The internet is an amazing thing.  Within one day, that hilarious National Guard photo rebuking Kerry was everywhere.  It deservedly got all that attention, but how about a little attention for some other things too?  American Thinker points to a story from Investor’s Business Daily explaining that Nancy Pelosi, who may be the next Speaker, [...]

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VULGARITY ALERT. DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ SOMETHING SLIGHTLY VULGAR. My sister sent me this joke in an email. As she said, “it pretty much says it all.” A dedicated Teamsters’ union worker was attending a convention in Las Vegas and decided to check out the local brothels. When [...]

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