The New Class Society

Digby, so much the queen of liberal bloggers that I frequently see links to her posts with “what digby said,” asserts that “The Wisconsin protesters are trying to stop the Republican governor from making it illegal for them to belong to a union so that they can live a decent middle class life.”

There is nothing in her statement that I can actually take issue with, other than that she does not differentiate between public sector unions and private sector ones, and she does not define “decent middle class life.”

Oh, and she lies outright, I forgot that part. The Republican governor is not trying to make it “illegal for them to belong to a union.” I am splitting hairs to some degree, because he is attempting to limit the bargaining power of that union, but polarizing the issue by misrepresenting the facts of it is not helping the cause. She is very critical of the “other side” when they do that. I guess it’s okay if you’re a liberal.

I’m really having a hard time understanding why we are fighting so hard to preserve unions for workers whose wages are paid by the public, by taxes, when we did not fight at all to preserve unions for workers whose wages are paid by businesses. I do not recall one single outcry ever being raised when a business declared bankruptcy and reformed itself as a non-union shop. If you had fought that fight I would have fought it with you, and I might be with you in this one, but you did not.

This seems to me like another case of the voting public being led to mitigate against its own best interest, demanding that which will result in higher taxes while another mob is nearby screaming for lower taxes.

Liberals seem to be trying to move toward a rather complex class society, with highly paid government workers and poorly paid private sector workers. That would seem to create a government revenue problem, but Lawrence O’Donnell has solved that by eliminating the current undertaxation of the wealthy. Another class definition emerges, then, where the wealthy pay taxes and the middle class do not.

Of course, the middle class would only have high income if they worked for the government, which creates the ineffable “self-licking ice cream cone” of government workers getting high pay from the government and returning a high portion of that to their employer in the form of high taxes, while low paid business workers have low pay but don’t have to worry about taxes.
I’m not sure where “the wealthy” fit in that picture, because my head just exploded, but I think they are the government.