Equity and Sabine Herold
Michael Totten has declared that he can never hate the unions because of the benefits he has enjoyed as the stepson of a union worker. I wonder how long his credulous tolerance of unions would last stuck on the freeway in Los Angeles during the transit strike. Knowing you, I am sure that you could endure a day for solidarity's sake. You probably would last at least a week. But on the seventh week of the seventh year...oops, just drifted into an augury...after several years of this kind of crap and the insidious effects of routine striking your love of unions would likely turn ugly. American unions survive better because of the treat of strike. In France, and much of the EU, strikes are the endless tollbooths of their existence; extorting a toll on the economy and the people as if it was their due.
The greatest gift the Unions ever received from Washington was the Taft-Hartley Act which prevents them from shutting down the United States and being loathed in return. We just invaded two nations because 3,000 of our citizens and guests were killed, and we would not stand for that kind of effrontery happening again. How well would the unions in the US stand up if they were conspicuously culpable for the deaths of fifteen thousand Americans? French union mandated maximum hours meant that during the holiday month, understaffed hospitals could not require staff to stay extra hours to provide life-saving care. French unions would have thought us vile and intemperate for not ignoring the piles of corpses with their fortitude and indifference if al Queda had declared itself the defenders of organized labor.
The key to American stability is the balance of power and the notion that all power derives from the people, not the government, the corporations, the military, nor the unions. In France they have never established that balance as a central idea of their identity and they suffer for it now. Hooray for
Sabine Herold for providing the beleaguered French with the prospect of equitable liberty.
UPDATE:
Clarified a passage that Michael Totten pointed out as unclear.
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