Who these people are

If you are an American you surely remember the term that went to the Nobility in Great Britain and, indeed, many other Kingdoms and Empires. It was, generally speaking, the entire class of Nobles from the highest to the most petty, and their functionaries and followers. Together they considered themselves divinely gifted to lead their Nations. These were the people who may have inherited wealth at the very upper-most crust, but further down they subsided on what the serfs and peons could provide. They feel entitled to their public monies and privileges.

Bill Quick has a nice letter from Thomas Jefferson on debt in which Jefferson looks at this sort of situation, and I will excerpt just a bit of it:

To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude.

If we run into such debts as that, we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are.

Our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

Our land-holders, too, like theirs, retaining, indeed, the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation.

This example reads to us the salutary lesson that private fortunes are destroyed by public, as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments.

Those living at the private expense for public government and putting the people in debt to them is, indeed, a plague of the ages.

There is a term for these people.

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) via die.net and I will bold a few pertinent parts:

Aristocrat \A*ris"to*crat\ (?; 277), n. [F. aristocrate. See
   Aristocracy.]
   1. One of the aristocracy or people of rank in a community;
      one of a ruling class; a noble.

   2. One who is overbearing in his temper or habits; a proud or
      haughty person.

            A born aristocrat, bred radical.      --Mrs.
                                                  Browning.

   3. One who favors an aristocracy as a form of government, or
      believes the aristocracy should govern.

            His whole family are accused of being aristocrats.
                                                  --Romilly.

Do you see the signs of those teachers going on strike in Madison, WI?

Courtesy: Legal Insurrection

These signs are by the 'educators': teachers and their Union affiliates.

What are they protesting?

Cuts to their benefits during one of the longest lasting recessions heading into a depression the Nation has known in decades.

Why are they protesting?

They feel entitled to benefits at the expense of the public. Not the loss of jobs, mind you, just benefits.

What do they want?

They want their Union to strong arm the representative government of all the people in Wisconsin to the benefit of the minority who work in the public sector.

What do we call these people?

Aristocrats.

What form of government do you get if they 'win'?

An aristocracy.

How do they treat the public square?

Photos Courtesy: Ann Althouse

Cleaning up trash is for the 'little people', you see. Or just make-work for their fellow Union employees... either way you cut it, there is no regard for the public square nor the public government.

What is the class of people who could care less for the public welfare so long as they get the benefits of a hard earned dollar made by someone else?

They are the Aristocracy.

The deal with public sector unions is this: they are attempting to leverage the few over the many while those few have a direct say into their employment situation not only via the franchise right but by being able to seek redress from government via individual petition.

By seeking to force government to their ends, they are putting forth that they are perpetually entitled to the public benefit and ever rising expectations by those doing the forcing to extract more and more from their hard working fellow citizens. They are trying to divorce themselves from the hard working citizen by utilizing the public taxation so as to take those funds earned by making products and providing goods and services in a competitive marketplace for benefits and jobs in a non-competitive civil service. Unlike private employers, those working for the public have a direct say in their condition via the ballot box and by seeking individual redress of government.

There is no rationale, at all, for public sector Unions.

Zero.

Why?

Do you really want an over-educated, under-caring Aristocracy that feels free to call in sick on the public dime to trash the public square while venting their spleen and utilizing hate-filled rhetoric and impugning representative democracy, thereby? The residents in Wisconsin PAID for that via their tax bills.

Is this really what you expect in return for paying your hard earned dollars to government and seeing that the government has not laid off a single one of these people and are only threatening their BENEFITS?

Because if you are ok with that, then you are a serf.

And you are forging chains of your own servitude to government by countenancing this activity at your expense.