Why Scott Walker is Right Part II

In part one of this discussion I restated the obvious by showing Scott Walker was right to limit collective bargaining for public employees. Now I want to ask the tougher question: Would it be immoral for Democrats to repeal those changes?  

I started thinking about this question several weeks ago when I was discussing this with a more liberal friend. I made the claim it would be immoral to repeal those changes and he questioned if that was too strong of wording. At the time I backed off and said maybe it would just be wrong or corrupt.

The first step to answer the question of whether something is immoral is to define what moral means. For this I checked in Dictionary.com and found two similar definitions that could apply, “of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior :ethical,” and “conforming to a standard of right behavior.”

Immoral was defined as not being moral. The second definition of immoral would depend on who set the standard of behavior so I will not explore the issue with that definition, since it would depend on who set the standard of behavior, thus making it only immoral to those who oppose it. Therefore, I will use the first definition.

I think one has to be careful with just relying on this definition. It is clearly the wrong choice to restore collective bargaining from a budgetary standpoint and from the standpoint of fairness to the citizens of the state who bear the burden to pay the taxes, but is that enough to call it immoral?

By my way of thinking I would say no. Based on what people commonly think; being immoral has a stronger meaning than just that. I am going to add that the intent of repealing the law needs to be corrupt and others are significantly harmed by the repeal of the changes. I think there is no argument on the second statement as we are watching states across the country in crisis because of the promises made by elected officials to public employee unions. In many cases, states hid the true cost from citizens by assuming unrealistic growth rates in pension funds or outright stealing from those funds like in Illinois.

We have a great example of harm done with the millions of dollars ripped off from taxpayers due to WEA Trust insurance scam and other excessive benefits at taxpayer expense. Also, collective bargaining is harmful because it is an obstacle to improving education. So there is no doubt great harm was inflicted and surely would be down the road if the changes were repealed.

The last point for my standard would be to determine whether they have corrupt intentions. If we were talking about when collective bargaining privileges were first given to public employees, I could not say for sure the decision was corrupt. Now with people educated about the disastrous results, it would be hard to argue they were not doing it to protect a major special interest group that donates to their party. Based of this I am willing to stand by my statement that repealing the collective bargaining limits is immoral. However, based on common connotation of “immoral” I would suggest that corrupt or unethical as being more appropriate.

This is why the Democrats favorite choice for governor is so bad. The unions had to find someone willing to do something corrupt and someone not concerned about having the legacy as the governor who put the state back on the path to destruction after Walker moved the state toward fiscal sanity. Kathleen Falk, the candidate for governor selected by unions, brags she is completely sold out to the public employee unions. She has even committed to veto the state budget unless the corrupt system is restored.

My reason for pushing this discussion is that we need to get people to understand that public unions are different from private unions and it is not legitimate to support the concept of public unions, regardless of your opinion of unions in general.

A few years ago I would not have thought this way; because I never thought that much about it. We need everyone to understand the truth about public employee collective bargaining. This is critical because someday the Democrats will be in charge and by then people need to understand this concept, so even then the Democrats will fear restoring their corrupt funding scheme. This is why no one should consider voting for a Democrat in this state, no matter what happens on other issues, until Democrats promise to not to repeal Walker’s improvements.

1)    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su4PwZCWUdg

2)    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOcjxT8ZAuU  - Scott Walker at CPAC