Daily Archives: 2 March 2018

Big Government and Responsibility

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The Progressive-Democratic Party-run States and the Republican-run States are demonstrating what they think of the intelligence and capability of ordinary American citizens.

The roughly half of states controlled by Republicans are therefore moving aggressively to roll back the law widely known as Obamacare, while the smaller number of Democratic states are working to bolster it.

One party does not believe that Americans in a free market, here for health care and for health care coverage plans, are capable of making sound decisions.  They need Big Government to think and act for them.  The other party believes the opposite: the ordinary man is fully capable of thinking for himself and doesn’t need Big Government to tell him what to do.

Oh, and that other party also believes in free markets and the associated competition that brings down overall prices and increases the range of options available.  That other party also believes that the greater range of options facilitates the decision-making of the ordinary man.  The one party believes the range of options only confuses the ordinary man and so—single payer for limited choices.

Agency Fees

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These are fees unions in a raft of jurisdictions are allowed to charge non-union members as a condition of those workers’ right to work at all.  Ostensibly, the fees are for the unions’ labor efforts in negotiating wages, benefits, and working conditions for everyone in the workplace.  The Supreme Court is considering a case, Janus v AFSCME, concerning whether such fees are constitutional.

It’s already the case that

Agency fees already are forbidden from paying for advocacy and other political activity.

Money is fungible, though, and even though agency fees might be barred from the purpose, the existence of the fees allows unions to reallocate equivalent money from other sources to the purpose—making it impossible actually to say that agency fees aren’t being used for the illegal purpose.  After all, if a union has $100, it can’t afford to engage in political activity.  If the union also collects a $10 agency fee from a non-union member, it now has $110, and it can afford to spend $10 on political activity, even if it’s forbidden by dollar bill serial tracking from using the non-union member’s $10 for the purpose.  Those ten bucks went illegally, however indirectly, to the political activity.

Moreover,

…plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case argue that negotiating with public agencies requires taking positions on government’s size and scope, which is a political question, so forcing employees to pay for the negotiations violates the First Amendment.

There’s the crux of the matter.  Agency fees are eminently unconstitutional, but I’m not sanguine that the Court will see it that way.  Both CJ Roberts and J Kennedy have shown themselves unreliable defenders of the Constitution, and the four Liberal Justices are a rock-solid bloc.