Who says unions don’t try to influence the outcomes of elections—at the ballot box itself, not via campaigning in a run-up to an election?
The image below, from a Wall Street Journal article about a Boeing engineers union contract election shows the degree to which a union will go to tell its members how to vote. 
The connection isn’t only moral. It’s economic, also, as new research is showing.
Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University says that our exploding welfare state has led to an American poverty rate of 14%—these welfare programs actually are
creating a dependency on government, which is unhealthy both for the individuals involved and their children, and also for the broader society[.]
Specifically, Department of Labor statistics show four programs in particular contribute to Americans’ increasing dependence on government.
This isn’t just academic theorizing, though. Doug McKelway, in his article at the above link, talked, among others, to a sandwich shop owner in Maryland:
Kyle Murphy…described how anecdotal evidence he sees as an employer jibes with Vedder’s assessment. He often sees new hires quit to seek government benefits.
“The people who know how to use the system best get the most out of it. It’s not necessarily the people who need the assistance the most,” he said. Murphy has seen many of his employees quit jobs, then claim they were fired to obtain unemployment benefits.
Vedder concludes,
We have had nearly four decades with growing incomes, rising standard of living for the majority, yet the poor have grown in number even as a proportion of the population. So some of these policies are not working.
I’m more cynical: since they create a captive collection of voters for the hander-outers in government, maybe they are working. Never mind that the outcome puts our republic at risk.
In a nation that’s facing a demographic implosion (a birth rate of around 1.5 against a rate of roughly 2.1 required to maintain current population levels, and an aging population (expected by 2050 (the current generation plus their children) to have four workers in the age band 50-64 for every three aged 15-29, and for every 100 people aged 20-64, 45 over 65), that chronically lives on the edge of famine, and that has a population increasingly aware of what could be compared to what is, the PRC government is not treating its poor or its farmers (22% of whom will be over 65 as early as 2030—the current generation) very well. And so it’s not treating its society or its economy with any foresight.
In December 2010, when [Fu Liang] says a campaign of harassment drove him off the small plot where he ran a fish farm, the local government paid Mr Fu just nine yuan ($1.45) a square meter for it.
The plot was quickly resold for 640 yuan [$103.11] per square meter to a developer, a national database of land transactions shows. The developer has built villas that sell for 6,900 yuan [$1,111.67] a square meter.
A markup of a factor of nearly 10 at each stage. Fu’s 9 yuan meter of fish farm was worth far more than he was paid. In another sense, it was priceless, since he didn’t want to sell.
Mr Fu now is unemployed, one among tens of thousands of former farmers who inhabit the impoverished fringes of Chengdu, a city in southwestern China. He has no heart to start another business. “What’s the point if the government can just destroy it?” he says.
With no sense of irony, the PRC’s new president, Xi Jinping, claims to want strengthen that demographically unstable society and its unstable economy—through property (land) ownership. After all, as Fu pointed out,
precarious land rights mean little incentive to invest in improving agricultural output, and no asset that can be sold to fund a move to the city. Low compensation for the millions ousted from their land—coupled with ineligibility for social benefits because they aren’t registered as urban residents—means for many a life of poverty on the edges of the cities.
And no incentive to bring additional children—boys only, mind, in a mandated one child environment, with the bias’ own long-run population sustainability implications—into the world. And the one-child policy was put in place explicitly to achieve the population reduction about to occur sharply.
Fat chance for any serious change:
“Push forward scientific development and advance social harmony,” proclaims a banner draped across one construction site, parroting a catch phrase of Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao. Mr Fu, surveying a noodle bowl of highway overpasses, said, “A few years ago, this was all farmland.”
Because farmland—the means of feeding the population—stands in the way of progress. Xi will have a great deal of trouble reversing that, especially with the money to be made converting farmland to urban land.
…and a potential First Amendment violation. Especially in a conservative environment, this is surprising.
The North Carolina House is set to vote on a bill that would
amend the state’s indecent exposure law to expand the legal definition of “private parts” to explicitly include “the nipple, or any portion of the areola, or the female breast.”
And if such exposure were to be deemed
for the purpose of arousing or gratifying sexual desire
the evil miscreant could convicted of a felony and locked away in a North Carolina jail for six months. “More mundane exposures” (whatever those are) could be guilty of a misdemeanor—and still locked up, now for 30 days.
Of course, it’s hard to discriminate such exposures from political speech, but that apparently doesn’t concern those good legislators. And a woman’s breast is, perforce, an obscene thing, to be kept hidden away—and state legislators are far better judges of such morality than are the rubes of the villages, towns, and cities who’ve already made their choice on this matter.
Which brings me to the state’s…rationale…for this exercise.
Co-sponsor Rep Rayne Brown, R-Davidson, told members of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that her bill was triggered by topless rallies promoting women’s equity that were held during the last two years in Asheville.
Oop—there’s that tacky free speech thing.
No matter; she added in all seriousness,
There’s some confusion about the law. I think our state deserves clarity on this issue.
Never mind that there is no confusion. The police of a town know their town’s ordinances. They have no need of knowing the differences with another town’s ordinances; they have no jurisdiction over there.
Nor is there any confusion on the part of the state police. They have no jurisdiction inside the town limits unless they’re enforcing a state law. Oh, wait—let’s make a state law, and give them jurisdiction.
Apparently, terrorism works in Europe. With Bulgaria having officially determined that Hezbollah was behind the terrorist bombing of an Israeli tour bus in Burgas on the Bulgarian Black Sea last summer, we’re getting some…interesting…responses in the rest of Europe. These responses center on European continued hesitancy to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization, as other nations outside of Europe (and one and a half within the EU (the UK is only willing to designate, euphemistically, the “military arm” of Hezbollah a terrorist organization) have done. We’re getting, for instance, things like the following.
The European Union’s Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (!), says,
The terrorists who planned and carried out the Burgas attack must be brought to justice…the High Representative underlines the need for a reflection over the outcome of (Bulgaria’s) investigation.
She can’t say the word “Hezbollah,” and since it was only Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian (the bus driver) who died, there’s still time, and need, to “reflect” on the meaning of the murders.
EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove, expanded on this reluctance:
There is no automatic listing just because you have been behind a terrorist attack…It’s not only the legal requirement that you have to take into consideration, it’s also a political assessment of the context and the timing.
It’s true enough that terrorist butchery has political overtones in the terrorists’ purposes, but responses to such murders have no politics at all involved—there are only morality and the duty of a government to protect its citizens.
Former French intelligence official Claude Moniquet adds
Calling it terrorist would limit France’s ties with Beirut and put French targets and personnel in Lebanon at risk of retaliation. The Bulgarian report doesn’t alter this realpolitik. There were always plenty of smoking guns.
It’s important to avoid annoying terrorists, lest the latter turn their ire on us. And there’s the standard offer of excuses for this carpet knightery.
Even the newspapers seem more interested in ducking and covering than in meaningful response. Sylke Tempel, editor of the German magazine Internationale Politik, told the New York Times,
There’s the overall fear if we’re too noisy about this, Hezbollah might strike again, and it might not be Israeli tourists this time.
There it is again: don’t offend the terrorists; they might hurt us next.
All of this reminds me of Spain’s withdrawal from the war on al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan in direct response to a terror bombing of a Madrid railroad station.
Indeed, Europe’s reluctance to angrify Hezbollah is an old and venerable policy. Spiegel International Online notes (the first link above),
For decades, European governments have preferred to avoid confrontation with Hezbollah as long as its terrorism was not directed at continental targets. In spite of a 1983 Beirut bombing that killed 58 French peacekeepers and 241 American Marines, deadly attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 (which Argentine prosecutors pinned on the group), and its military support for the embattled Syrian regime of Bashar Assad (whom the EU has repeatedly called upon to step down), Brussels has resisted naming Hezbollah a terrorist outfit.
The problem is that this timidity does not affect only Europe. Like paying the kidnapper’s ransom, it puts the rest of us at risk, also. It rewards the terrorists for their actions rather than contributing to their destruction.