Supreme Court Finds That Illinois' Public Employees Lack Free Collective Bargaining

George Leef posts in Forbes about the case of Harris v. Quinn, which was recently decided in favor of the workers and against the union.  The case involved home health care workers who own their own tools, or whose employers own their own tools, but receive healthcare dollars from the USSA. The Service Employees' International Union struck a deal with now criminally convicted Governor  Rod Blagojevich and later Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois to force the private sector healthcare workers to join the SEIU.  The SEIU, Governor Quinn, and Illinois had no interest in whether or not the employees wanted to join a union; they were happy to sign a law to compel them to join, undoubtedly in exchange for the SEIU's contributing to Blagojevich's, Quinn's or some other Democrat's campaign coffers.

The court overturned this authoritarian arrangement.  In deciding the case, the court addressed Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which held that public sector employees who do not wish to join a union can be compelled to pay an agency fee although they must be refunded monies spent for political and ideological purposes unrelated to the union's workplace responsibilities.

The Supreme Court seems to have brought that entire approach to public sector union dues paying into question. Under the union contract at CUNY, for example, nonmembers of the union are compelled to pay an agency fee equal to the dues. Since the dues are 1.05% (1% for part-timers), there would be a significant reason not to join the union if the agency fee were to be eliminated. The court seems to say that the agency-fee arrangement is a First Amendment issue:

Preventing nonmembers from free-riding on the union's efforts is a rationale generally insufficient
to overcome First Amendment objections...and in this respect Abood is something of an anomaly. The Abood court also failed to appreciate the distinction between core union speech in the public sector and core union speech in the private sector, as well as the conceptual difficult in public-sector cases of distinguishing union expenditures for collective bargaining from those designed for political purposes. Nor does the Abood Court seem to have anticipated the administrative problems that would result in attempting to classify union expenditures as either chargeable or nonchargeable. 

The time may be ripe to reopen the question of compulsory agency fees in the public sector.

More on Brooklyn College

My piece on the refusal of Dean Willie Hopkins to consider a multimillion dollar grant proposal that supported AACSB accreditation because he was too busy pursuing AACSB accreditation (which requires funding for faculty that the college cannot afford) appears in the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy website at http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=3033#.U7RhObEzTzM .

Income Inequality Is a Bogus Cause That Covers Up Wage Stagnation Due to Government

Recently, the media and a wide range of crackpot academics have been banging the income inequality drum. Charges of income inequality have been fundamental to socialism since its inception. When that inception was is subject to debate; Karl Popper claimed that it goes back to the ancient Greeks.

The Spartans had a communistic society based on the village's raising children, common dining, common schooling, and shared equality.  There was no room for individual expression or self-actualization. The chief reason the Spartans are remembered today is their wars.  The movie 300 celebrates their victory against Xerxes in the Battle of Thermopylae.  More so, they are remembered for their leadership of the Peloponnesian League of Hellenic states against Athens in the Peloponnesian War.  Although Athens abused its power, it was a quasi-liberal democracy; Athens invented democracy along with liberalism, science, philosophy, rhetoric, law, and theater.

Athens was a precapitalist society based on serfdom and slavery--as was Sparta--but it recognized private property.  There was a considerable degree of income inequality in Athens, and Aristotle spoke of the importance of magnificence, what today might be called corporate social responsibility.  The Greeks had a primitive view of private enterprise, but Aristotle began to see that private economic transactions are based on equivalent value; he saw such economic transactions as the foundation of human civilization.  He did not, however, understand that technology can replace slavery as a source of value.  That understanding began with capitalism in Europe, especially in 17th century Great Britain.

Communism sees all wealth as due to labor; hence, it discourages progress.  Innovation under communism occurs through imitation of capitalist progress.  If there is no capitalism, as is occurring in healthcare, then there will be no innovation because there is no reward for innovation. Marx saw no value as coming from innovation.  He lifted this fallacy, the labor theory of value, from classical economist David Ricardo, but it is also consistent with Aristotle's philosophy, which Marx admired. Marxism, like Progressivism, reflects a medieval world view in which the universe is static and human intellect can grasp all knowledge.  Marxism presses this superstition further by claiming that the dictatorship of the proletariat can run a command economy.

There was perfect equality among the citizens of totalitarian Sparta. In contrast, there was considerable income inequality among the citizens of Athens. Sparta is remembered for its warrior skills. Athens is remembered for innovation.  Income equality is code for totalitarianism coupled with violence.

The Spartan economy was appropriate for its time; it was the Athenians who were well ahead of their time. The classicist Michael Rostovetzeff claims that in the fifth century BC the Hellenic colonies in Italy achieved a standard of living not again equaled until the 19th century.

All progress requires inequality.  At the same time, inequality often occurs where there is no progress. Private ownership is necessary but not sufficient for innovation.  The periods of great innovation, in fifth century BC Athens , 14th century AD Florence, and 19th AD America, were characterized by income inequality. Sparta had a much more equal society than Athens did, much as North Korea and Cuba have more equal societies than we do.  The claim that there needs to be income equality is a claim that there needs to be suppression and exploitation.  Such suppression and exploitation will benefit those who live off government: academics, investors, Wall Street executives, corporate executives, government officials, and public employees.

The issue these special interests must deflect is the stagnant real wage. This has been caused by government policy, regulation, and monetary expansion, for wages lag inflation.  In the late 19th century, during the gold standard period, Americans could save.  In the post-1970 inflationary period, Americans have slaved, not saved. Americans have become the serfs of bankers, corporate executives and public employees.

News Coverage of My Struggle against Political Correctness at Brooklyn College

The New York Post, Inside Higher Education, and the New York Observer have covered my struggle at Brooklyn College concerning the dean's refusal to provide funding for ideas I had that do not fit the college's socialist ideology.  It saddens me that institutions of higher learning cannot tolerate a  diversity of ideas and opinions.  Since I have arrived in higher education, I have been repeatedly attacked because of my free-market views.

One thing that the articles did not make clear is that all of the ideas that the dean turned down were my own. There were no "strings attached" to anything, and the foundation did not encourage me to pursue anything.  Rather, the dean refused to allow me to get funding for my ideas because the faculty will not tolerate them.

Talk about academic freedom as a reason to refuse funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation and other freedom-oriented foundations is pretext.  The faculty of Brooklyn College have squashed my academic freedom to pursue ideas that interest me.  That the bigots do so in the name of academic freedom is telling.  Just as their fellow totalitarians inspired George Orwell's image of Newspeak in 1984, so do universities claim that their suppression of libertarians' academic freedom is in the name of academic freedom.