Who the Heck Elected YOU?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Who the Heck Elected YOU, anyway? Whether it be among friends or family, we’ve all heard that phrase tossed about by someone who found his pet idea left by the wayside. It’s a question of “official” authority, in most cases. Say your friends get together for a movie, say you make a film choice and everyone begins to agree. But there’s always that one guy that doesn’t agree with your movie choice. He wants to go somewhere else and when he finds no one siding with him he asks in frustration who elected you to make the decision? After all, there was no election so why did you get to make the movie choice over his druthers? It’s easy to laugh off that frustration in most cases and settle for a community decision among friends. But it is another thing when that concept is applied to decisions made by government placemen and appointees. And it’s even worse when our tax money is spent by the billions because of the requirements imposed by government workers unions that the polity did not elect to have the power to spend our money.

And we are seeing this illicit decision making by unelected union bosses grow at exponential rates these days. Take for instance the trouble that Governor John Corzine of New Jersey is having. His state budget is wildly over allocated and he’s decided to lay off some government workers to save precious cash, cash, it should be remembered, that IS the people’s tax money. This is a move that every business is confronted with at some time or another. When times are flush and a lot of work is in the offing, business hires. But when times get tight and the need for workers flails, unnecessary employees are let go. It’s a fact of life that cannot be avoided. Oh, but not government! Once you get a government job it is, for some unexplainable reason, assumed to be a permanent job.

Corzine is attempting to “furlough” state workers — in normal human speak, that means lay them off — but the unions are taking the state to court to stop the governor from saving the taxpayer’s money by forcing him to keep them all on full-time.

How do these union thugs justify these many useless court actions? Catch this facile explanation:

“The administration is continuing to ask public employees to bear the burden of our state’s fiscal crisis — while requiring only token contributions from the state’s wealthiest individuals,” said Hetty Rosenstein, state director for the Communications Workers of America, which represents more than 55,000 public workers.

Let’s transpose this situation from government to the private sector. Can anyone of any integrity say that an employee shouldn’t lose his job at McDonald’s because McDonald’s didn’t try to get “the rich” to take some cuts before the layoffs begin? “The rich” bear no responsibility as a whole for the down turn of business. As in real life, the same must be true for government — in fact even more so because of the coercive power of government. When government budgets are over spent and workers need to be cut, the fact that rich people are still rich should have nothing whatever to do with the decisions to cut workers.

And then we get to the question that started our rumination here. Who the hell elected Hetty Rosenstein to go spend our tax dollars on useless, illicit and necessary court actions against government? Not only are the taxpayers paying for the court actions, they are also paying for the unnecessary workers, their benefits AND thug Rosenstein’s salary!

And we are ultimately confronted with the singular fact that unions are antithetical to good government. They are unaccountable to the voters and in bed with those we actually elect who seem to live to bloat budgets with unnecessary jobs. And when governments pad departments with even more pals, placemen, and hangers on that then become union members, we find those union thugs continually vote to return the complicit elected officials back to office over and over again. Essentially, these workers are voting themselves their fellow taxpayers’ money! This is as illogical and undemocratic as it gets in government.

A public employee union is a corruption of good government in every sense of the word and they should be made illegal. They are in a position to spend billions upon billions of the taxpayer’s taxes without having to ever come before the people with their demands. They are wholly unaccountable to the voter and can attempt to force their way with impunity.

But it isn’t just unions that are finding power in government without being accountable to the voters. Another example of the illicit power these government placemen, appointees, and employees are attaining can be seen in a Houston Chronicle story from March 31. In that story, Chronicle writer Matt Stiles notes that lobbyists are paying increasing attention to the bosses of regulatory agencies and spending their lobbying money (to the tune of $1.6 million) upon them in hopes of finding favorable outcomes for various industries.

Who elected these appointees to fill their permanent jobs, never to be held accountable for the many billions of the taxpayer’s money that they spend, and to have lobbyists butter them up with free diners, expensive gifts and plied for favorable regulatory decisions?

In essence, no one did. Sure they were put in place by some elected official or another, but once their initial benefactor is out of office, we the taxpayers are often stuck with the appointee for the foreseeable future. Once these people get in the union, firing them is nearly impossible. About the only way we can ever be rid of these millstones is when they get arrogant enough to find trouble with the law. But, as we wait for the courts to uncover their criminal empire building, we the people lose.

It all speaks of a government that has taken too much power unto itself. It is a situation ripe for abuse and that abuse is born on the backs of every single member of society. These leeches are sapping the life of this country and there doesn’t seem to be a thing we can do about it because elected officials, government employees and the courts are all in favor of bloated, unaccountable, unnecessary government.

It’s so bad that one can almost see the sense of the patronage system where the whole government down to the last clerk is turned out of office with the election of each new politician.

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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston

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