Friday, February 25, 2011

Collective bargaining rights

At the New York Times 

Friday, February 25, 2011  

Contact a Reporter

Send an e-mail to: Paul Krugman

Collective bargaining rights
Collective bargaining rights in ANY country supposedly based on the "Blessings of Liberty" should be unrestrained.
Just a thought, I am out looking for a job.  I am hired by XYZ Company.  I work there for 50 years happily.  I am assured verbally by my boss, I will get 80% of my current income at retirement for life.  I am 70 years old and want to retire.  My boss has not been paying into my pension fund as he had promised.  He goes out of business.  He has no assets I can attach. 
I am left HIGH and DRY.  I have no alternative.  That has happened and will happen.  That is a FACT of life.  
Why can not State and Local Governments declare themselves INSOLVENT just like large publicly traded companies do to get out from under the bad management of the past? 
To eliminate this type of scenario in the future I would create a government insured PENSION authority much like the FDIC should have been.  And get the individual a yearly GOVERNMENT confirmation that his pension funding was solvent.   Didn't we use to have something like this???
Now the Grand Old Party of Lincoln, the father of modern inflationary monetary policy, will tell you "Government action is not to be trusted.  Government's efforts to correct a wrong will always result in over regulation and wasted resources."  And to some extent that is correct.  Not be-cause it is a government effort though.  Government's flaws are the result of Government's limited resources, humanity.  Anything done via humanity will be flawed as an unavoidable result of human fallibility. 
A government of the people, by the people and for the people is - to date - the BEST way to get the onerous work of regulation done.  Laissez-faire de-regulation is a seductive theory but if our current economic issues, the result of banking DE-regulation, have taught us anything, "We the People" need government's democratically derived authority to REGULATE and thus keep the GREED of "We the People" in check. 
To say Government is bad is to say "We the People" are bad.  We always need to remember Lincoln's 11th and 12th commandments:
o       11th "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."  
o       12th "Government of the people, by the people and for the people" is still the best of the BEST, even if it is not perfect.
We need to make this a teachable moment!
We need to learn something form our mistakes of the past!!!
G.O.P. (Republicans) want to balance the budget ELIMINATE the Bush era tax cuts!!!!!!!!!
I would contend that we do not have any individual rights in this country, "Everybody, BUT the innocent victim, has "ABSOLUTE IMMUNITY"" for the deprivation of rights; but that is another story.
DGJeep "The Earth and everything that's in it" (http://dgjeep.blogspot.com/)
Thanks in advance,
"We live in a Lawless Society...
"Agere sequitur esse"
"Time is of the essence"
David G.Jeep  
http://dgjeep.blogspot.com/
E-mail is preferred Dave@DGJeep.com, DGJeep@DGJeep.com
(314) 514-5228

David G. Jeep
c/o The Bridge
1610 Olive Street,
Saint Louis, MO 63103-2316


No comments: