The artist may doubt his own work, but he is bitterly disappointed if other people doubt it also.
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Author: Redactor
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F. Marion Crawford
To expect defeat is nine-tenths of defeat itself.
Michigan’s state House and Senate passed Right-to-Work bills last week, because, as Governor Rick Snyder said, workers “should be able to decide whether to join a union or not.”
Which exact bill will wind up on the governor’s desk is anybody’s guess, but one could be signed into law by Snyder as early as tomorrow. Both would prevent unions from requiring workers to join as a condition of employment.
Predictably, Michigan Education Association President Steve Cook argues that legislators “want to force unions to . . . provide se+rvices, benefits and the protections to non-members who will not pay a penny for them. It defunds unions.”
That’s a rather one-sided way of looking at the issue. The cases of Michigan day care workers and home health care workers, both railroaded into union, tell a different tale.
Two years ago, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy challenged the bizarre unionization of 40,000 self-employed day care providers by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the United Auto Workers, with dues skimmed “from the Michigan Department of Human Services subsidy payments made to some providers on behalf of qualifying low income parents.”
Then, there’s the $33 million SEIU has nabbed “from the elderly and disabled in Michigan . . . through a unionization scheme it orchestrated when Jennifer Granholm was governor.” Jarrett Skorup writes in Michigan Capitol Confidential that “tens of thousands of people are being forced to send money to the Service Employees International Union simply because they care for a friend or family member who receives a Medicaid stipend.”
After reviewing these two cases, the right-to-work is clearly part of an even bigger right: the right not to be ripped off.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Milton
Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth.
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Townhall: Falling on Soft Times
We have entered a new era, and perhaps nothing expresses this better than the worry, by those who define themselves as “of the left,” that the poor are being “left behind” in the recent economic recoveries.
For some reasons, the cause for this is assumed to be “markets.” But what if the cause for this new social stratification were nothing other than government itself, as advocated and run by those who say they “most care”? What if they were responsible?
Go to the Townhall column, and come back here to consider a few more ideas. Here are some references:
- All quotations from Casey Mulligan are from his talk with Russ Roberts of EconTalk. Listen. It’s fascinating.
- The Mohs scale, mentioned early on, is a scale of mineral hardness. Glass, we were told in school, is 5.5 on the Mohs Scale; diamonds rate a 10.
- The importance of the Basel agreements in setting off and ramping up the monetary aspect of the current depression can also be found on EconTalk, this time a conversation with Steve Hanke.
- The crucial role played by the triple-A ratings system was identified by Lawrence J. White, and is briefly dealt with in David Henderson’s review of a book on the origins of the current crisis.
I urge my readers to look into Mulligan’s book, and the book cited immediately above. Tell me what you think.
I bet most folks really want to help families with disabled children, with the kind of “kids” (many of whom are adults) who need round-the-clock help. I am sure that is why the State of Michigan pays family members to care for their children that have such extraordinary and demanding needs.
But does it help family members to force them to join the SEIU?
This is a strange and disturbing story, a story of a power grab … of naked ambition corrupting the last bit of charity out of the system. And it is certainly an affront to justice.
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John Milton
No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free.
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John Milton
He who reigns within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears is more than a king.
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Copyright and Wrong
Even if one disagrees that patent and copyright laws should be shelved (as some critics contend), no sensible person denies that these protections are subject to pretty ridiculous abuse. People have claimed extraordinarily ludicrous proprietary rights to everything from commonplace words (“spike”) to generic software functions (click to buy).
Now we have German publishers demanding payments from Google and other aggregators for the crime of pointing visitors to the publishers’ websites. Fair-use excerpts are unfair without compensation, according to the German Association of Newspaper Publishers and others. The idea seems to be, “You must pay us if you give our work free advertising.”
Suppose the demanded licensing rules were confined to commercial contexts. If applied consistently, the rules would jeopardize a wide range of hitherto uncontroversial citations, e.g., in book and movie reviews, not to mention books and movies. Making the demand even sillier is that Google enables sites to block any displaying of their content, or to reduce a search result for their site to a bare link with no snippet of text. No site is obliged to benefit from the horror of receiving Google-directed traffic.
Google is arguing its case publicly, and German business sentiment is hardly united in favor of mandatory licensing. According to Bernhard Rohleder, who heads an association of German technology companies, such legislation “would be unique worldwide [and would tell] investors: Innovative online services are not desired in Germany.”
Let’s hope sanity prevails. (Send me a nickel if you quote me on that.)
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Milton
He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.