All “Road Maps” lead to De-Unionizing the Public Sector

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Bruno Behrend

Bruno Behrend, J.D., is director of the Center for School Reform at The Heartland Institute. From early 2006 through late 2008, Behrend hosted a radio show in the Chicago area that showcased authors and policy specialists including publisher Steve Forbes, columnist Mark Steyn, author Shelby Steele, and many others. In 2008, Behrend coauthored Illinois Deserves Better - The Ironclad Case for an Illinois Constitutional Convention, the release of which coincided with a campaign to pass a referendum calling for a Constitutional Convention in Illinois. Mr. Behrend has served as an advisor to groups seeking to rewrite the legislative article of the Illinois Constitution and as Field Director for FreedomWorks in Illinois. In 2009, he was policy director for a gubernatorial candidate in the Illinois primary election.

Latest posts by Bruno Behrend (see all)

• Heartland Daily Podcast – Bruno Behrend: Homeschooling Blazing the Trail for Education Choice - April 14, 2016
• Heartland Daily Podcast – Bruno Behrend: Common Core - May 19, 2015
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With Paul Ryan being chosen to deliver the Republican Response to last night’s SOTU, the Democrats are going to target Ryan’s Road Map as the end of civilization as we know it. It isn’t as if the pollsters and prognosticators in the Republican Strategy Room (where ever that is) don’t know that. That is why choosing Ryan to give the response was so significant. It shows that the Republicans are a) up for the fight, and b) think they can win it.

It is also important for the free-market community to offer robust, aggressive “road maps” at the state level. There has never been a better time to be bold. Furthermore, I’d argue that the worse off the state, the more bold we should be.

That brings me to one of the most important destinations in every road map. The de-unionization of the public sector. To that end, there was no better article to begin the debate than the one that appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

Enjoy it. Forward it, and engage your friends. It’s time to roll back the frontiers of the state, and de-unionization is a prerequisite for that to happen.

How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage

Liberals were once skeptical of public-sector unionism. In the 1930s, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia warned against it as an infringement on democratic freedoms that threatened the ability of government to represent the broad needs of the citizenry. And in a 1937 letter to the head of an organization of federal workers, FDR noted that “a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”

When the epitaph for the “New Deal” is written, let it show that it was public employee unions – teachers and administrators in particular – that killed it.