By Richard Larsen

Published – Idaho State Journal, 06/12/11

Some things just outlive their usefulness. Except for the eccentric few among us, car starter cranks, buggy whips, and 8-track tape players come to mind. Add unions to that list.

One cannot be a student of history without recognizing the tremendous contributions unions made to the emergence of the middle class in early to mid 20^th century America. They forced improved working conditions, workweek hours, and compensation levels. But they have become primarily political entities, with forced union dues used heavily for amassing power in the political arena. Even Bob Chanin, former top lawyer for the National Education Association, admitted that in a moment of unabashed frankness in his farewell speech two years ago, when he said, “It’s not about the kids…it’s about power.”

In a local union gathering this week in Pocatello, organizers lectured to a compliant small crowd that “Attacks on unions is (sic) an attack on the middle class.” Actually they are not. The Department of Labor classifies 55% of Americans as middle class. Union membership constitutes a fraction of those households as union membership has dropped to 70-year lows at 11.9% of the working population according to statistics released in January.

Economist Thomas Sowell recapitulated the sentiment brilliantly recently when he wrote, “The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.”

In the public sector, unions have forced several states to the brink of bankruptcy, as brought to light recently in Wisconsin and Ohio. The Investor’s Business Daily phrased this verity in stark terms recently when it stated, “Public-sector unions serve no legitimate function except to feed at the public trough of governments that have gone broke seeking their political support.”

Former AFL-CIO president George Meany once said, “The main function of American trade unions is collective bargaining. It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” They’ve obviously figured out how to do it, and to do it well, since the public sector is the only growing area of union membership.

There is a fundamental problem with unions’ collective bargaining with governmental entities, which invariably results in unions being represented on both sides of the negotiating table since the government officials representing tax-payers interests are largely bought and paid for by union campaign contributions. This places the taxpayer in the unenviable position of not truly being represented at the negotiation table. After all, politicians are unlikely to “bite the hand that feeds them.” The result is imbalanced and irreconcilable budgets, as evidenced by the fact that the ten states with the most budgetary red ink are those where organized labor hold the states hostage to their negotiated entitlements.

A friend of mine who used to be a local union president told me recently, “Unions, at least in my opinion, did valuable work in the ‘30s when employees were being abused. Now, unions are destroying the very industries they work for. Huge labor union leadership is woefully out of touch with its rank and file membership. It truly is all about power and money.”

In the private sector, there is overwhelming evidence that unions have outlived their usefulness, not least of which is the way the United Auto Workers contracts nearly destroyed the U.S. auto industry. But the data are indisputable that unions in the private sector severely restrict economic growth and output.

Idaho is a “right-to-work” state. That means that workers can have a right to work without being forced to join a union and pay union dues. This actually makes Idaho, and the other 22 right-to-work states compliant with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which says in article 20, “No one may be compelled to belong to an association.” After all, there is no logical reason to require workers to join partisan political organizations as a condition of their employment. The only possible reason to force political organization membership is for the aggrandizement of the organization itself.

The Investor’s Business Daily analyzed data from the National Institute for Labor Relations Research recently and the results were revelatory. From 1999 to 2009, real personal income in right-to-work states grew 28.3% versus 14.7% in forced-union states. That’s almost twice the growth. Disposable income in right-to-work states stood at $35,543 per capita in 2009 vs. $33,389, and growth in real manufacturing GDP jumped 20.9% compared with 6.5% in non right-to-work states. IBD also points out from Bureau of Labor Statistics data that right-to-work states added 1.5 million private-sector jobs from 1999 to 2009 for a 3.7% increase; states that are not right-to-work lost 1.8 million jobs over the same period, a decline of 2.3%.

Clearly unions in the public sector are budget-busters, and impede growth in the private sector. Their obsolescence is indubitable. 

Published - Idaho State Journal, 06/05/11

As improbable as it may be, there is actually policy emanating from the White House that is even more inscrutable and illogical than their domestic economic policy. Those who understand real-world economics may be wondering what could possibly be more illogical than Obamanomics. It’s the president’s foreign policy!

It’s only logical that in the world of foreign policy, you reward your friends and make things more difficult for your enemies, in hopes that you may make friends of them someday. Yet the very week that the leader of the most free nation in the Middle East, and our closest ally in the region was scheduled to visit the United States, President Obama chose to scold Israel and roll back history to reward their and our adversaries in the region.

In an historically imprudent and unprecedented speech, the President sided with our self-avowed enemies in the region, Iranian and Syrian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah, when he lectured Israel that they should return to their pre-1967 borders, which would trim their tiny country by about a third of it’s present land-mass. Currently, Israel is slightly smaller than our fifth smallest state, New Jersey, with about 20,000 square kilometers, or 7,700 square miles. Idaho has counties larger than the current state of Israel!

Before the 6-Day War of 1967, Israel comprised less than 1/10 of 1% of the land-mass in the Middle East. In June of that year, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon launched a unified attack against Israel to, as they stated, “Drive the Jews into the sea.” Israel heroically repelled the attack, and gained the West Bank, the Golan Heights (their primary defense in the North), and the Gaza Strip. Israel retained those lands, now called “The Occupied Territories” by anti-Semites, mostly for defensive purposes. Yielding up that ground would not only leave Israel virtually defenseless against their and our avowed enemies, it would reduce Israel’s land-mass to about 14,000 square kilometers, or about the size of our fourth smallest state, Connecticut.

Although Obama made his speech weeks ago, it marks a historic and landmark shift in U.S. foreign policy. Not only did Obama castigate Israel, but he sent warning flares to all our allies at the same time. After all, if Obama is willing to throw Israel under the bus for illogically ideological purposes, what might he do to the diplomatic relationships with other friends around the globe? I’m sure the Brits were thinking to themselves, “Sorry Israel, we know how it feels.”

The president was also simultaneously rewarding the Muslim extremists’ tactics of terror in the region who seek not only the reduction of Israel in size, but the elimination of Israel as a state and the eradication of Jews in the region. For some inexplicable reason, most Palestinian sympathizers choose to ignore the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), now known as the Palestinian Authority, still retains the 1964 wording in its charter, that its primary goal is “the destruction of Israel.”

Obama telling Israel that they should return to pre-1967 borders would be akin to Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, telling the U.S. that we should return to pre-1959 borders. That would, after all, remove all doubt as to Obama’s citizenship as qualification to serve as president.

It would also be as presumptuous as Israel lecturing Obama that the U.S. should return to pre-1847 borders, which would satisfy La Raza objectives of returning California and most of the Southwest to Mexico.

Further, there really are no “Palestinians,” for there is no Palestine, nor was there one in 1967. When Israel won the war they kept Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan. So the inhabitants that remained there were Egyptians and Jordanians, not Palestinians, and they enjoy much more freedom than they would in either Egypt or Jordan. This was affirmed by former PLO executive Zahir Muhsein who said in 1977, “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle (jihad) against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.

After the president’s provocation, Netanyahu firmly reminded us, “Israel has no better friend than America, and America has no better friend than Israel.” He further put the Palestinian issue into perspective with the statement, “If the Arabs lay down their arms there will be no more war, but if Israel lays down its weapons there would be no more Israel.”

Aside from the biblical reasons to be allied with Israel, from a purely secular foreign policy perspective, you do not insult your friends, and reward your declared adversaries. Yet as illogical and ill-advised as it is, that’s precisely what our ideologically motivated president has done. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Why should our foreign policy be any more logical than our domestic and economic policy?