-By Warner Todd Huston
What are the best jobs on average in California? Apparently being a government worker. Infuriatingly, government workers live far better, have higher salaries, retire earlier and have better benefits than most in the private sector even though, like leeches, these same government workers live off the taxpayer.
The worst of all worlds for the taxpayer is a government union. Government unions do nothing whatever for the very people paying the bills. They do not improve services, they don’t professionalize workers, and they wildly grow the waste of tax dollars. Worse, government unions give public servants higher salaries, richer benefits, and earlier retirement dates than the taxpayers footing the bills.
Even the patron Saint of the liberal left, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was adamant that government workers should never be allowed to unionize. FDR thought it was “unthinkable and intolerable” to have a government workers union.
It’s for good reason, too. Government workers do not create the profits that might help enrich benefits. Whenever government unions get raises it simply means that taxpayers have to pay more to make up the difference.
But the bigger outrage about government unions is that they cut out the voter from having any say at all in what their own tax dollars go to pay for. When government unions negotiate they do so with other members of government, never the very people forced to pay the bills. Government unions have the power to give themselves allotments from the public treasury at the expense of the taxpayer yet gives those taxpayers no say at all in the matter.
Government unions could not be less democratic or less American.
Thomas Lifson recently described some of these un-democratic riches that government workers in California have afforded themselves and the results are outrageous.
“The average full-time compensation for employees of 55 North Bay cities was $130,172 in 2013, with thousands earning more than $200,000 a year and hundreds more earning more than $50,000 in overtime alone,” Lifson wrote. “Such compensation is significantly higher than that of peers in the private sector.”
Lifson also found that statewide the average pay for a municipal worker was over $120,000 a year.
Tell me, dear reader. Do you make $120,000 a year?
There once was a basic assumption about choosing a career in the public sector. You may never get rich because compensation is lower than in the private sector, the assumption went, but it was a bit more likely that you would have job security because government workers don’t often lose their jobs.
But now you get a government job and you make far more than the private sector, have better benefits, and can never get fired no matter how bad you are at your job or no matter how needless you job is.
This is intolerable.
The whole idea of a government union is an illegitimate notion. Government unions should never have existed in the first place and they should be eliminated going forward–yes even for cops and teachers.
Due entirely to the corruption that is government unionism, for instance, California has a massive short fall in its government pension obligations that just in education alone soaks up 85 percent of the operating budget (and that is money stolen for kids’ education).
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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