Shannon Love

Unions Are Grounded in Violence

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This story about French union members threatening to blow up their factory if their demands are not met [h/t Instapundit] lays bare the ugly truth about unions.  The French union members are simply reminding the French people of where their union’s true power springs from.  The power of unions does not come from warm and fuzzy class solidarity and negotiation but rather from the willingness of union members to destroy and kill in order to further their own economic self-interest.

Back in the 1930s the government took over the role of forcing union demands on everyone else, so we have forgotten the ugly, violent, racist roots of union power. We’ve allowed the unions to sell us a mythology about unions being little people fighting the big and powerful.

In reality, unions function by hurting everyone outside the union, especially the poor and powerless.

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These Job Makers are Going, Boys, and They Ain’t Coming Back

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Now main streets whitewashed windows and vacant stores

Seems like there aint nobody wants to come down here no more

They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks

Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back to

Your hometown, your hometown, your hometown, your hometown

— Bruce Springsteen and E-Street Band, Your Hometown

Obama in Michigan

“The hard truth is that some of the jobs that have been lost in the auto industry and elsewhere won’t be coming back,” he said in a speech at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich. “They are the casualties of a changing economy. And that only underscores the importance of generating new businesses and industries to replace the ones we’ve lost, and of preparing our workers to fill jobs they create.
 
He added, “For even before this recession hit, we were faced with an economy that was simply not creating or sustaining enough new, well-paying jobs.”
 
But some economists believe Obama is training people for failure.

Well, perhaps training people for his failure. The real problem is that neither Obama nor The Bruce understands what jobs really are.

We talk about jobs as if they are physical objects. We find jobs. We lose them. We trade them. We save them. We export them by shipping them overseas. Occasionally, we believe they are stolen. Metaphors are common in language and usually harmless, but sometimes we seem to forget that they are metaphors. This in turn causes us to misunderstand the phenomenom under discussion.

In the case of jobs, the metaphor stops us from asking what physical event actually occurs when jobs “go away” and “don’t come back.” Examining this metaphor tells us something that is very important and ignored in most political discussions.

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Stimulus Bungle

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Government as a real-world institution makes very poor decisions overall. Many people buy into the myth that individuals in government who are driven by a greed for power make better decisions than do people outside of government who act from other motives. A Fox News analysis [h/t Instapundit] provides profound evidence this is not the case.

Comparisons between foundering California and prospering Texas are all the rage now because the differences are quite stark. Now matter what area you examine, California is hurting badly. The state was Ground Zero for the housing bust. Unemployment is exploding and people are leaving the state in droves. Texas, by contrast, escaped the housing bust, has a balanced budget, a growing manufacturing sector and low unemployment compared to most places.

Clearly, California needs more help than Texas. (What form that help should take is another discussion.)

Look at this Wall Street Journal table (scroll down) that breaks down the per capita stimulus spending for each state. Compare California and Texas. Texas get more money per capita from the stimulus in virtually every single category, sometimes by quite a lot. When California does get more per capita it’s not by much.  When you factor in Texas’s significantly lower cost of living, the comparison looks even worse.

How did the political system crank out such a perverse result? It can’t be political pull. The Texas federal delegation is overwhelmingly Republican and therefore locked out of the stimulus distribution. Texas has even less pull with the Obama White House. As previously noted, Obama routed money preferentially to areas that supported him, which in the main Texas did not.

In a time of perceived national emergency and one-party rule, fans of government decisionmaking would predict that government would make even better decisions than usual, but,  unsurprisingly to the rest of us, in the bizarre sausage-making nightmare of the federal political system, Texas came out with more money per capita than California. If the political system worked as well as it does in the fantasies of leftists, all of the money that went to Texas would have gone to California instead. Even those of us who believe the stimulus foolish nevertheless believe that we should at least spend the money on the people hurting.

The guy with the surfboard needs the help not the guy with the Waverider. Why couldn’t the real-world federal political process figure that out?

texasvscalifornia

Their Fear Tells Us a Lot

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Apparently, for some people, there is nothing more terrifying than a couple of dozen frumpy, middle aged, middle-class white people. [h/t Instapundit]

Honestly, they called the cops on these people? What did they think, that a church’s ice cream social had got out early and now the participants were roaming the streets in a sugar and milk-fat induced frenzy seeking to drink the blood of leftists?

I make a point of the protesters being white because it feeds into the same perception that I touched on in the Neo-Nazi Boogyman. A lot of leftists have heaped abuse on various tea party protesters as being racist and violent based on no other criterion than that they were non-leftist whites. Clearly, these people have wildly exaggerated, hysterical fears of politically active non-leftist white people, and they lump all of these ordinary people in with the racist, left leaning, white-supremacist micro-minority.

Somehow, I don’t think that if a bus load of leftist, African-American protesters showed up that the first response of the staff members would be to close the blinds, lock the doors and call the cops. Even though I know absolutely nothing about Senator McCaskill, this little incident tells me a lot about how the people in the Senator’s office, and therefore the Senator herself, view their fellow citizens.

[update (2009-7-22 5:21pm): The local Charlottesville paper reports that a neighboring business called the cops not the Senators office. However, that doesn’t get them off the hook for locking the doors and closing the blinds.[h/t Dem Bones who seems to think that makes everything all right.]]