-By Warner Todd Huston
The Cato Institute has issued its latest Tax and Budget bulletin, this one centered on public-sector unions. The essence of the report is that public employee unions violate freedom, make government more expensive and inefficient, and the incestuous relationship between unions and politicians takes away power from the voters.
While labor unions do play a diminishing role in the private sector, the study points out that they play are playing an increasingly larger role in government these days through their “vigorous lobbying efforts.” I’d add that they are also playing a larger role due to the personal greed of our politicians who are the happy recipients of large amounts of the campaign donations that unions typically provide, as well.
And it’s all bad for government finds Cato. “Collective bargaining is a misguided labor policy,” the report says, “because it violates civil liberties and gives unions excessive power to block needed reforms.”
To fix this evil, Cato recommends that collective bargaining in the public sector be banned.
Continue reading “
Cato Study: Unions Violate Freedom”
The Oregonian has a disheartening 
What is it that the left and the Old Media said about the Tea Party movement? Didn’t they say it was not really filled with regular folks and didn’t they say it was not really a grass roots level effort because some nefarious “top-down” Republican groups were secretly behind the whole thing? That’s what Paul Krugman said in 
It’s a veritable cornucopia of Obamagandistic musical agitprop. You’ll recall the 
The California Teachers Association spent $211,849,298 on lobbying and political spending to get its way in California in 2009. Along with the CTA, the Calif. State Council of Service Employees and 13 other organizations spent a total of one billion dollars on political lobbying of the State House at Sacramento. All of these special interests have helped push California to the brink of insolvency.
The Better Government Association (
Ed Barnes of FoxNews has a nice 
The Philadelphia Inquirer published a 
On February 24, 
The Hill is reporting that 70 percent of our Congressmen’s Washington offices 
Americans for Prosperity applauds Governor Quinn for opening an 
SPRINGFIELD – February 24, 2010. Officials from Governor Pat Quinn’s Administration today announced that, for the first time in Illinois’ history, the public can actively participate in the state’s budgeting process. The Governor’s Office of Management and Budget (GOMB) today launched www.budget.illinois.gov, a Web site that allows Illinois residents to provide feedback that will be used to shape the state’s fiscal year 2011 budget.
Two weeks ago the U.S. Senate passed new rules that would require new spending to be offset somewhere else in the budget, the so-called paygo rule. They did this because Democrats and Obama got tired of being called big spending socialists and wanted the veneer of fiscal responsibility with which to cloak themselves. It lasted two weeks before the 
What would the Founding Fathers say about our handling of the country if they were able to comment on the current state of affairs? It is easy to put words in their mouths but fortunately, we have for posterity recorded their words and intents to refer to for clarity in times of need. Some may say that this is a new day and age, therefore what the Founding Fathers had to say is simply not relevant to our current circumstances. Those who say this do so in ignorance of human nature and for self-serving reasons. Humans over the past 5000 years of recorded history may have advanced in terms of knowledge; however, their motivations and emotions are still no different now then they were in the past. It is motivation and emotion that govern human character, not knowledge and the Founding Fathers knew well the passions that influence those in power.