I highly recommend a column in the Evansville Courier Press by political science professor Stephen Graham entitled Government can’t avoid its responsibility to Hoosiers.
The Daniels administration views Indiana government agencies with the bottom-line mentality of the stockholders of a private corporation: How much is my dividend check this quarter?
n the words of the governor’s chief budget officer, Charles Schalliol, “If … a private-sector firm can do (government) service better and at less cost, we ought to accept that” (The Star, Dec.15).
The problem is that, in a democracy, government is not merely another vendor in a marketplace of goods and services. And citizens are not just taxpayer-consumers who vote based on the ratio of the dollars they pay in taxes to the dollars of benefit they receive in public services.
The commercial model of government trivializes and obscures the larger purpose of our democratic institutions, which is to inspire the loyalty and self-sacrifice of all citizens and to help guarantee for them the broadest possible equality of economic, social and political opportunity.
The foundation of our democracy is a social contract between the government and the people. Government agrees to protect and promote the rights and interests of all the people. The people, in turn, agree to support the government, not just by paying taxes, but also by participating in the civic culture.
[tags]Privatization[/tags]
Wow; it sounds like Stephen Graham has actually read the works of the political philosophers who inspired the founders of this country.
This reckless deviation from conservative icon idolatry cannot be tolerated, and Graham has exposed himself as an ivory-tower academic unworthy of our trust.
True moral fiber comes from mindlessly mouthing talking points, not from developing an actual scholarly familiarity with a subject.
In short, Professor Graham, you are OFF the Club for Growth Christmas card list!
… which is why you build such things into the contract. To me, that beats yelling “No!” all the time.
If the point of government is to provide employment for Hoosiers, then the taxpayers of Indiana need to be prepared to foot the bill. I would suggest that most Hoosiers are not, given how much they want their property taxes lowered.
As far as companies not giving benefits to their employees, pass laws stating they must. IIRC Wal-Mart is Indiana’s largest employer, and they’re legendary for their poor treatment of employees.
That said, as Indiana becomes more of a service economy, I don’t think a service economy will provide benefits at the same level the manufacturing economy once did.
Joe:
You wrote:
That may be because service workers in most sectors in Indiana are poorly organized and poorly unionized.
Good unionization can win benefits for Indiana service workers that are commensurate with the value they provide to the economy.
The open question is whether employers will succeed in persuading the general assembly to outlaw effectively unionization; if it does, then we can expect a thousand Wal-Mart employee overnight unpaid lock-ins to bloom. Share prices in Indiana-based stocks will go up while the standard of living goes down and the tax base is eroded[*], leaving less money for social services, leading to more unstable (or nonexistent) family situations, more drug abuse, and more crime.
The savvy solution from a capitalist’s perspective, I expect, would be to staff all service-sector jobs with convict labor. We could just make it a felony to not graduate from high school, cutting out the middle man.
If there gets to be a glut of workers in this convict service class, we can always just award the more well-behaved ones as household servants to citizens who have earned such a benefit. That benefit could be earned through civic service to elected offical’s campaigns, though since the affluent are busy people, it is of course perfectly legitimate to recognize cash donations as equivalent. Time is money, after all, and only those who haven’t proven their worth through wealth need debase themselves by donating or selling their labor.
[*] Recall that progressive taxation is “punitive of success”, capital gains taxes especially so, and even estate taxes which leave the first 2 million dollars of an estate untaxed are pure Stalinistic communism.
Branden:
You left out “shoot the old & poor”, but other than that, that pretty mych covers it.
If unionization in Indiana is anything like the Indiana Democratic Party, I won’t hold my breath for “good” unionization.
I think increasing the minimum wage and mandating better health care options from private employers is something more achievable in the short term.
I’m on the fence with unions (my friends here have helped me see some good things that I missed before).
However, I don’t understand why the service industry isn’t already unionized? After all, you can’t outsouce the service industry! Factories can pack up and go to a more union-unfriendly state, but people still need a place to eat and buy things!
What is stopping these people from doing it today? They seem to have all the cards, at least as much as anyone else has had when they started unions! Maybe after a good deal of the population is a part of a union they will make sure laws like this don’t pass.
Joe:
You wrote:
Ah, how careless of me. :)
Jason: I can’t adequately answer your question, but the service industry is not unionized to any great degree because many service employers (e.g., Wal-Mart) are vigorously anti-union. I’m not a labor lawyer, but IIRC, the NLRB has not been particularly employee/union friendly in recent years, either. Perhaps someone who is better informed about recent NLRB decisions could give some good examples.
Let’s privatize welfare office, highways, and the prisons. Next comes the police, and soon thereafter the army. Actually, I understand we are doing pretty much that very thing in Iraq, with our volunteers working side-by-side private security forces (in past years we called them “mercenaries”) who get paid several times as much. That’s a real moral booster. I seem to recall that the army was contracted out by the Romans just about the time their empire fell apart.