Yuengling has been my beer of choice for years. It’s a great tasting lager and it’s from American’s oldest brewery in Pennsylvania. Over the last decade Yuengling opened up a new brewery in Tampa, Fla., and now they distribute in 14 states on the East Coast. Want more to like? Well, a few short years ago Yuengling’s employer decertified their union. As you can imagine the Teamsters weren’t happy about it. They threatened to boycott, but apparently it’s not working.
Unions have long been on the decline in the United States. For companies wishing to remain competitive unions are parasite. The next 25 years will be a transition time for the relationship between the employee and the employer.
The Postal Service is the prime example of a struggling company that will never be financially viable given its labor costs. Employees have enjoyed unsustainable benefits that now have crippled the ability of the Postal Service to continue to operate. Americans are facing a situation where “entitlements” are drying up in state and federal governments and in corporations.
We should celebrate when employers do the right thing. Having a job is a lot better than losing it because the company goes belly up. Here’s to you Yuengling! Even if I’m four years late.
Progressive governors throughout the United States are fighting the status quo. In this scenario progressives are represented by conservative politicians trying to control spending in nearly bankrupt states. The Democrats represent the status quo. The union stranglehold needs to be broken.
In Wisconsin, one thousand teachers called in sick to protest in Madison. These teachers should be fired immediately. I’m not the only one who thinks these protests are ridiculous. Here’s Larry Kudlow’s take on the situation:
Governor Walker is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, and he wants state workers to pay one-half of their pension costs and 12.6 percent of their health benefits. Currently, most state employees pay nothing for their pensions and virtually nothing for their health insurance. That’s an outrage.
Nationwide, state and local government unions have a 45 percent total-compensation advantage over their private-sector counterpart. With high-pay compensation and virtually no benefits co-pay, the politically arrogant unions are bankrupting America — which by some estimates is suffering from $3 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
Exempting police, fire, and state troopers, Governor Walker would end collective bargaining for the rest. Unions could still represent workers, but could not get pay increases above the CPI. Nor could they force employees to pay dues. And in exchange for this, Walker promises no furloughs for layoffs.
Some Americans scoff at the notion that what happened in Greece could happen in the United States. Well, it’s happening in Madison, Wisconsin. What the GOP is trying to do in Wisconsin isn’t extreme, it’s necessary. Meanwhile President Obama says that this is an “assault on unions.” With remarks like this it’s becoming clear that the President in unfit for office. The only problem is that the GOP doesn’t really have anyone to run against him.
Yours truly, Club Soda, happens to be one of those whom the White House and its fascist phalanx of Democratic Party machine drones have characterized as part of “the mob”. In reality, the vast majority of those showing up at town hall meetings to confront their “representatives” are average Americans expressing their Constitutional right to assemble peaceably and disagree with the direction those representatives are taking them.
So what if they’re encouraged by right-wing blogs and talk radio to take to the streets? How else do citizens mobilize en masse? When progressives do it, it’s called “community organizing,” but when conservatives do it they’re referred to as a “mob”. In reality, progressive community organizing means recruiting professional thugs, goons and bullies from unions and Soros-funded shadow groups with benign nom de plumes like Americans Coming Together (ACT).
As these community groups are brought together to help quell the popular uprising of ordinary Americans, you can almost hear Hedley Lamarr from Blazing Saddles: “I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists.”
What concerns many Americans is the surrender of political power from the local and state level to the Federal level. The more responsibility the Federal government takes for the individual, the less free that individual becomes.
The powers delegated to the Federal government are quite clear, and they basically boil down to national defense, infrastructure and interstate commerce. The 10th Amendment clearly states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, or prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The entire concept of the Constitution was to provide the necessary cohesion to the Union not provided by the Articles of Confederation while maintaining the autonomy of the individual to pursue life, liberty and happiness with minimal Federal restraint. This is why we do not see an enumeration of “positive rights” in the Constitution, such as a “right” to health care or other creature comforts. Rather, the Constitution enumerates “negative rights,” or the freedom of the people from governmental encroachment on their individual lives and decisions.
Perhaps no one personifies the corruption, cronyism and condescension currently permeating the nation’s capitol than Barbara Boxer. Through Boxer, we are provided a window into the soul of an arrogant aristocracy that will happily trample on our freedoms to expand their power and influence. It is this arrogant exercise of power at the expense of the individual that is driving much of the dissent in America today.
Progressives complain bitterly about evil giant corporate conglomerates, and to some extent I agree with them. I simply hate having to deal with large corporations because I can never get anything done quickly and easily. I am not an individual to this corporation; I am simply a number in a vast sea of ones and zeroes. “Press One for English. Prense dos para Espanol. Press Three for this. Press Four for that. And so on and so forth until you hang up in disgust. Have a nice day!”
The point is that the larger and more remote any organization gets from its constituency, the less likely it is to have any care for the individual. And that’s the problem with yielding more power from the local and state level to the Federal level.
Do we seriously believe that a gigantic, centralized bureaucracy will be efficient, caring and, ultimately, just? If we do, we deserve what we get, which will ultimately be a huge corruptacracy that serves a mish-mash of powerful special interests and grievance-mongering groups living 30 years in the past, a.k.a., community organizers.
This is not “progressive”; it is positively regressive and de-evolutionary. Was the Soviet Union a success; a model to be emulated by future U.S. administrations? What did we learn from past collectivist/socialist/fascist/Marxist forms of government? We learned that concentrating power and wealth in a centralized government led to vast societal misery and poverty. The “people’s republics” were about people alright… the people in power.
President Obama’s war on the American taxpayer continued by repealing Executive Order 13202. Unions aren’t just content with bankrupting the big American car companies. Greg Mankiw has more.
This is good news for union workers, bad news for non-union workers, and bad news for taxpayers, who will pay more for what the government buys on their behalf. In my judgment, it is bad news from a macroeconomic perspective. As I learned from Professor Larry Summers, one “cause of long-term unemployment is unionization.”
Recent Comments