Marcus @ 35 –
Agreed about O’Reilly. The guy is not an intellectual to begin with, so trying to hold him to standards of intellectual consistency or thoroughly-thought-through principle is, uhhhhh, probably expecting too much of him. I think he’s an entertainer first and foremost, and mostly a populist after that, as a semi-distant second.
The classic union hall guy is becoming less and less important in the overall economic picture. Union membership in the private sector has been declining steadily for decades and is now somewhere around 12% or 13%.
By contrast, union membership among public sector workers is at 37.4%.
These two statistics set side by side are as clear a message as any, I would think, that the Democrats are NOT the party of private-sector anything, and that includes private-sector unionized labor. Lip service is still paid for the sake of union legacy voters (read: suckers, of which we have plenty here in the Pittsburgh region, alas), but the trend is that if the federal government has to put private-sector union members on the altar to save Big Government, they will do just that. Some might argue (with some merit IMO) that this has already been happening for years now.
The interesting thing about Kerry & the yacht tax is (certainly not John Kerry! – *rim shot*) that two things are revealed about human nature:
The first is that regardless of the (D) or (R) after the name, the vast, vast majority of people are going to make choices that either put or keep more money in their own individual wallets. (Note that free market principles are consistent with this aspect of human nature, while socialism pretends it either doesn’t exist or can be beaten or starved out of stubborn kulaks while apparatchniks can do as they please.)
The second is that while everyone from Kerry to the shoe-shine guy may be tempted/inclined to use the levers of government power to feather his own nest more than his neighbor’s or competitor’s, only the Kerrys of the world are able to do so. The shoe-shine guy recognizes this and so requests an equal application of the law to everyone.
It’s not that the shoe-shine guy is necessarily a committed free marketeer on the level of high principle, but that he’s got enough horse sense to recognize that if there is dealing from the bottom of the deck going on, HE is going to be the one who loses the card game.
This is why equality before the law is indispensible to a free market system. Keeping the government out of the role of deciding marketplace outcomes is the only way to get the system trusted by most of the shoe-shine guys. The minute the little guy senses that the laws consistently help the rich and hurt him, he’s going to chuck all the “let’s play fair” credos by which he has been trying to live his life (a non-confrontational attitude being the sort designed to avoid the gaze of the rapacious and vindictive rich — let them eat each other), and he is going to start fashioning shivs in his garage. IOW if he’s going to be screwed no matter what by the system then he’s going to take someone down with him.
This is the tragic irony of what the progressives are doing to our American way of life. This is one of the few countries in the world, perhaps the only one, where they could have had as much as they wanted, just as long as they did not want it all for themselves. But they did want it all for themselves. And now the shoe-shine guys are eyeing the lathes in the workshop.
