He’s always a font of opinion and ideas, that one. I may not always agree but once again, he does bring up some that most of us would never have thought. That is pure Ian – always arriving at viewpoints that just come out of nowhere but still, after all these years, make my head hurt (this one, just a little).
Some emphasis by me.
If you want to dismantle the public school system, start with means testing. Make parents start paying their fair share of the cost, and watch what happens to spending — and to union contracts.
Instead of “taxes,” think “user fees.” But this brings up the whole argument of the Marxian “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” schtick. Which also means “no kids, no fees paid.” Balance that, however, with what I’ve said against the “but it’s a Public Good for all” argument with the example of my aunt in Mattapoisett, MA, where the school district said, “thank you for your years of financial service to the school; now that you are a Sr. Citizen, we will no longer charge your property taxes henceforward.
She and my uncle never had children.
After that, remove any mention of age from the statutes and rules governing school, and make all placements on the basis of tests for proficiency in literacy and numeracy. Watch what happens when half the students never get out of third grade, because they can no longer be promoted on the basis of age.
Here we go with the cries of “WHY are you stigmatizing the disabled?”, once again. However, as we have seen with my favorite whipping post, the Baltimore School District that spends oodles of money and hardly any students are proficient in ANY academics, stopping “social promotion” will cure a LOT of evils within the system (as no one is ever held accountable for their part in it.
But if you want to get rid of teachers’ unions, you have to cut to the root of the problem, which is giving unions in general any special treatment under the law. Indeed, they shouldn’t be mentioned in the law at all, any more than book clubs or bowling leagues.
And you can start this easily by making unions collect their own dues money “owed” to them by their members instead of the School District “removing it” from the process of deductions from someone’s paycheck.
People should be free to form unions — that’s just freedom of association. But employers should be free to ignore or even avoid them. That’s also freedom of association, and it’s freedom of contract, but it’s based on something more than that.
Article 83 of the state constitution says that people have the inherent and essential right to free and fair competition in the trades and industries; and that it is the state’s responsibility to protect that right from all monopolies and other conspiracies that tend to hinder or destroy it.
I’ll add that if unions should exist, be they in the private sector. In the public sector, when they strike, this is the Government striking against We The People. It is the Government telling us, even as most have good working conditions and pay which was the reason they came into being in the first place, but…
Sidenote: always check to see what the median income is in a District compared to what teachers are demanding.
…that they are better than the people “they serve.”
It’s left as an exercise to the reader to try come up with wording that would more clearly and unambiguously demand that the legislature eliminate special legal status for unions, along with mandatory occupational licensing, which is used by unions as a tool to curb competition.
And there’s the nub of the problem – what is the persuasion path to get to that endpoint?
And, as always, his other comment will provoke a bit as well.
