I would like this to be true, but I’d have to disagree, much to my regret. The whole point of politically powerful unions is to safeguard the jobs of their members. As long as a union of government workers remains ‘politically powerful,’ it has the power to influence the people who can extract money from the public by force, and therefore the power to protect inefficient and unjustifiable government jobs, with no regard to whether they’re valuable at all.
There are at least two remedies to this state of affairs. The first would be if the government unions lost their political power. In a democratic republic, if the public overwhelmingly turned against government unions, the political elites would follow. However, I don’t see this happening much of anywhere right now, at least not on a sufficient scale to have a real effect.
The other way is simple failure of the government. Things that can’t go on forever will not go on forever. At some point, a governmental authority may become effectively bankrupt, and it may the power to pay off its favored constituency. In California, for example, Vallejo was forced to declare bankruptcy.
Even so, governments (especially sovereign national governments) are the people with the guns. Sometimes, the people with the guns can hold on for a long, long time. As of this writing, Robert Mugabe is still the president of Zimbabwe. So far, the Kim dynasty in North Korea seems to be going strong. For that matter, the people of Greece (a far more sane nation than either North Korea or Zimbabwe) do not seem to have fully resigned themselves to economic reality just yet.
I would like this to be true, but I’d have to disagree, much to my regret. The whole point of politically powerful unions is to safeguard the jobs of their members. As long as a union of government workers remains ‘politically powerful,’ it has the power to influence the people who can extract money from the public by force, and therefore the power to protect inefficient and unjustifiable government jobs, with no regard to whether they’re valuable at all.
There are at least two remedies to this state of affairs. The first would be if the government unions lost their political power. In a democratic republic, if the public overwhelmingly turned against government unions, the political elites would follow. However, I don’t see this happening much of anywhere right now, at least not on a sufficient scale to have a real effect.
The other way is simple failure of the government. Things that can’t go on forever will not go on forever. At some point, a governmental authority may become effectively bankrupt, and it may the power to pay off its favored constituency. In California, for example, Vallejo was forced to declare bankruptcy.
Even so, governments (especially sovereign national governments) are the people with the guns. Sometimes, the people with the guns can hold on for a long, long time. As of this writing, Robert Mugabe is still the president of Zimbabwe. So far, the Kim dynasty in North Korea seems to be going strong. For that matter, the people of Greece (a far more sane nation than either North Korea or Zimbabwe) do not seem to have fully resigned themselves to economic reality just yet.