The grand aim of all science is
to cover the greatest number of empirical facts
by logical deduction
from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.
Albert Einstein
Earlier One-Off Post: Talking Point: Rudy Giuliani On Whether Obama Loves America
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I'm a "don't mess with me" dove; I'm simply not going to going to get involved in matters not directly involving America's security.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) March 2, 2015
Public officials, cutting essential services to pay off politically powerful unions/retirees, are the new slumlords. http://t.co/zrTjqtChI5
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) March 2, 2015
Dead Foreign Communist Theorist Karl Marx For President?Our public school education dollars put to good use...
3D Printing: Making a Difference
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(continuing a thread from IPI which dealt with the discussion of mandatory agency fees where non-union workers are required to pay dubiously specified fees for unwanted collective bargaining representation; I found myself trolled by a number of union stooges in a thread that at last count was nearing about 50 comments, probably about 40 involving the third persistent troll, who is apparently a unionized state employee. I suffer no fools gladly, especially when they started spouting off propaganda soundbites. The troll eventually adjusted his tone; he is definitely pro-union, not a "progressive", more of a Reagan Democrat. As of noon today, these involve my latter comments in the thread; I don't directly quote the troll, but it should be clear from context what he was arguing.)
Pro-liberty people like myself believe in VOLUNTARY associations like unions, but the current issue involves using the power of the State to effectively make other workers subsidize a union they don't support; it's a de facto policy of third-party taxation based on the concept that union bargaining made them better off; but who knows whether a different union or no union at all might have made better off? For example, during the shale oil boom of Williston, ND, Wal-Mart found that it had to include the starting wage for most positions at just over $17/hour, in part due to a very competitive labor market. It might well be that many companies might be willing to pay a premium not to risk interruption to business operations, the high legal costs of negotiating an agreement, etc. I remember one job I had, not union, where I personally negotiated 4 raises over 2.5 years, literally over 50% of my initial salary. In part, I could do that because they knew with my experience, I could make that or better on the open market.
But the reality is that, as we've seen, negotiated public sector pensions can result in cutbacks in essential services, including younger state/local workers, and many teacher unions negotiate seniority-protected job cuts, regardless of teaching effectiveness and/or cost--time and again, senior members refuse a minor cut in pay to avoid laying off junior teachers. This has nothing to do taxpayer concerns over getting the best value for their tax dollars; it has more to do with the self-serving protection of senior workers, many who are getting paid more than their fair market value. (Teaching is one of those perverse cases where people see a decrease of productivity, i.e., smaller class sizes, as "good".)
As for NAFTA, all sides benefit from better continental integration. As Don Boudreaux and others point out, the US should declare unilateral free trade; you don't need years of negotiation to negotiate "free trade"--the government just has to get out of the way. My issue with trade pacts is that they aren't nearly free enough. But YES, NAFTA is positive just as the states being able to flow goods and services through a decentralized domestic economy. Disregarding the dysfunctional War on Drugs, Mexico is more prosperous, its citizens are enjoying lower prices on less competitive commodities, etc. Cf. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21592612-north-americas-trade-deal-has-delivered-real-benefits-job-not-done-deeper-better
(separate comment)
You do realize "teabagger" is a pejorative term, slang for certain homosexual behavior, right? [Discussant described himself as such.] ("Progressives" think they are being oh, so clever...)
The right to work is a fundamental aspect of freedom. As a university professor (in fact, my whole career, including as a technical consultant), I've not been a union member. I've had my fair share of bad bosses (including in academia), but I have some rather unique knowledge, skills and abilities, and if I'm in a bad situation, I'll move on. I think that unions are an anachronism in a world where bad employer treatment of its workers is hard to keep secret and represents an existential threat in terms of attracting employees.
A lot of worker concerns are often based on paranoia. I'll give you a telling example from personal experience. One place where I worked had gotten its start leasing time on mainframe computers. When I joined the company, they were starting to invest in microsystems, where payback was within 6 months, so we were looking to migrate from mainframes to microsystems. We had our own mainframe--and the annual maintenance cost was something like $250K. We also employed a lot of mainframe developers/programmers. Long story short, I was the protege to one of the company's co-founders; I was tasked by the executive VP to get their microsystems operations under control--our developers were using diskspace faster than the company could acquire new disks, some required data loads weren't happening on schedule, etc. I took my mandate and whipped operations into shape; there were some developers who didn't like some privileges had been stripped etc., but among other things I had compressed an important dataload from over a week to 2 days, other company production DBAs were coming to me, even though I had no formal authority, etc.
My boss, a techie who used to design computer games for fun before he came into work, hated to deal with customer management and decided to leave, recommending me as his successor. A key mainframe worker--who did not even know me--went to management and told them if I was made manager, he would quit. (An aside: the guy still ended up leaving.) Somehow the rumor was circulating among the mainframe developers that I was management's axman, that I was going to fire their dinosaur asses, and replace them with squeaky clean college grads who knew how to work with microsystems. In fact, this was pure fantasy. I had never had a discussion with management on personnel issues, and in fact, I knew management was worried more about losing their business/industry knowledge than about any retraining issues. I had never said or implied anything to warrant this paranoia. This is something that management should have addressed earlier; in fact, I was the ideal person to mentor them through the transition. Instead, I was thrown under the bus and eventually transferred to another department as management named an incompetent mainframe developer manager to the role. In fact, she tried to block my going down to Brazil for 3 months because she lacked faith in the replacement I trained.
(another comment)
Apparently you would rather war with China than win-win trade with them. (There's a faux quote from Bastiat to the effect if goods do not cross borders, armies will.) Actually the first US-China trade pact in the Communist era was during the Carter Administration, and China entered GATT and WTO during Reagan's second term. Reagan, a free trader who negotiated NAFTA, sometimes used protectionist tactics to ward off more radical trade moves, similar to how RomneyCare was devised to thwart a single-payer system.
Choose Life: Abortion or a Child with Down Syndrome? "I’d always wanted a daughter...I had a daughter to protect."
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| Daddy & Rosie, a Gift from God: via LifeNews |
Political Humor
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Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists
Carly Simon (with James Taylor), "Mockingbird". As a way of bridging their solo acts, I'll first reprise their two hit duets together.
