Flight from sanity

The events of the past two weeks in Wisconsin have pointed out a problem with an understanding of the purpose of a labor union as it applies to the private and public sector.  One can be all for the 'right to organize' on the private side and against it on the public side.  In actuality the 'right to organize' is not a right but a privilege extended to an organization that then goes over the right of the private owner to run their organization as they wish.  As all rights are individual rights and stem from individual rights, when it is allowed that an organization may represent a number of people who are a sub-set of the citizenry at large, it is by the fiat of government that this privilege is created: it does not come into being simply by organizing and is just a means of operations of an organization.  You, as an individual, do have the right to gather together with your friends and like-minded people to accomplish tasks.  That is an individual right.

Having that organization recognized and granted power to do things beyond a corporate charter is, however, legislative in nature and granted by our government.  It is not handed down from Creation nor vested in anyone, but is a recognition of a fictive device made by the hands of man.  Thus private unions are just such a fictive device, as are corporations: they are created by law and backed by it, often to the disregard of the rights of the individuals involved and their liberty.  That goes for both unions and corporations as fictive devices.  The cost/benefit trade-off is made in public by all of the people via their representative government created in a form of a republic to oversee the laws necessary to sustain society.

On the public side a public employee union deals with that organ of society we call government.  Unionizing against that organ is anti-democratic in that it seeks to change the will of the people expressed via government for hiring in the public realm.  This becomes an area of sovereign law and there are times when I feel that I have to be the one to get down the basics so as to impress upon others that there are sharp and extreme differences between public and private sector unions.  Thus I have put down commentary at Hot Air, like this tidbit given 'as is' warts and all in spelling and syntax, punctuation and grammar:

Those in the public sector have their wages and benefits set by legislation.

They ALREADY have ‘collective bargaining’ in that they get a VOTE into their legislative branch AND the right to petition it: both guaranteed by the Constitution.

It is the people who set the agenda for the public sector via the legislative branch of government.

When you Unionize to go against the legislature, you are going against the representative system in which the employee ALREADY has a say via their vote. They don’t need to Unionize. Unless you are advocating the will of the few to be imposed on the many by utilizing the striking of public employees AGAINST their employers, which is the people.

How hard can this be to understand?

ajacksonian on February 25, 2011 at 11:05 AM

Really, this should not be a hard thing to get.  Government is a collective bargaining system of society and everyone has a say in it guaranteed by the Constitution both in Amendment I and in the body with the guarantee of a republican form of government.  Going against that via a union is to utilize an organization of the minority of the people to dictate to the majority what the terms of employment are in public.  That is not only anti-democratic, but anti-republican as well, both the lower letter case in description.  In private that is a legal interaction between fictive organizations with some 'personal' rights equivalents granted to them in the way of powers.  That is guided by law set by representative government, as well.

I expanded upon this in another piece of commentary on another Hot Air item, and it is direct enough and I will again put it down verbatim, warts and all, for the amusement of the public which is expanding after yet another repetition with expansion of the prior commentary because this point is being missed:

At this point the question of ‘getting an education’ really should be one that is in flux as the technology we have is making the older school-based instruction system obsolete. That is not to say that ‘teachers’ are obsolete: those who can encourage students to learn and how to learn is still a vital skill, even more so in this modern age.

What is going out the window is the system of instructor in front of a classroom of children with chalkboards as a way of presenting material. This is 13th century technology and methodology used in the 21st century where entire bodies of work, not just individual books, are now available immediately with hyperlink indexes on resource material. Something is seriously wrong with this picture of chalkboards, books, films, notebooks and classrooms.

Where is the inventiveness that the information revolution as supposed to spur on? Oh, wait, teacher unions are interested in preserving jobs that don’t change, so they don’t change, so our children have to figure out ways to integrate the new technology without help as their teachers can’t be bothered to change their way of doing things.

Come again? This is AMERICA where we are supposed to be the most inventive people on this PLANET and adapt to anything we discover and create as that is what we DO. Yet no we have a 13th century concept embedded in a 19th century institution, trying to dictate a 20th century way of life (and barely mid-20th at that) in the 21st century.

This does not compute.

This does not work.

Johnny still can’t read at the rate of 1956, even though we pour tens and hundreds of billions into this institution.

The teachers aren’t making enough?

BS.

They aren’t being challenged to DO more, and create a brand new way of teaching that allows students to learn more in a faster way that is not beholden to the teaching institution but concentrates on teaching children how to learn on their own WITH this new technology. At this point our children probably know more of the technology than the teachers do, but we will not ask them what would make an interesting way of presenting topics. Then our wisdom, being older and wiser, comes into play to create a rich way of presenting subjects that entices and encourages learning and critical thinking.

We shouldn’t be paying AT ALL for this failure on the part of the educational system. We are paying to much for it to continue failing in the exact, same way it has for decades. And yet to dare say that and its: ‘Oh, you hate teachers!’

Nope.

I hate people unwilling to admit that we have failed and that we, as a society, must take responsibility for this failure and change our conception of education and learning to adapt to modern times. Perhaps there are teachers that can do this… but this system of unions and bricks’n'mortar schools is stopping us from inventing a better way to do things.

Offer pure pay for performance: if you can teach children how to learn and want to learn more, then you get rewarded. Doesn’t matter if you are a pay-for school, religious school, public school, homeschooler or a child who learns how to teach him or herself. If you mean you will pay for performance then DO IT and stop moaning about teachers in failing schools not being paid enough.

Put up and mean it.

Or accept that you want failure and are unwilling to pay for success… and it will be cheaper to succeed in a new way than it is to fail in the old way. Ask the French about the Maginot Line on that, ok?

ajacksonian on February 25, 2011 at 4:48 PM

Ok, a bit hard to read here and there, definite grammatical and spelling errors, plus needs a thorough going-over, but the point remains pretty clear - that in this 'tumult' of invective, the utter failure of our school systems is being ignored.  Really why should Wisconsin, or any State, continue to pay for failure?

The public does have the absolute right to change its mind and have that expressed in the sovereign decisions of their government via representative democracy.  That should include putting the entire ball of wax on the table and asking if we really need the wax anymore and stop arguing about who gets what portion of the wax for their own benefit as the wax, itself, is no longer useful, what with all the inclusions in it and festooning of ancient systems of Progressive teaching dating way back to the 1970's stuck in a pre-digital age.  The system is archaic and needs a complete re-start and clean sheet of paper approach and we need to stop fixing something that doesn't work in the first place.