Posted By BillHeise on March 1, 2011

I posted this far-too-long note on Facebook today in response to my friend Larry’s question about union membership. He had posted this video by a smug guy on his Facebook page.

I responded with my usual questioning about the math of this guys post. I had heard that the deficit was not 137 million dollars but 3.6 trillion. I did the math and came out with a cost of $828.95/person. I didn’t know (or really care) that the news was from a Wisconsin newspaper.

He wrote back:

I don’t know if Indiana (your source) has any inside information than what this guy is saying. Not sure which is correct. I know your feelings on public employee unions, so I have to ask: What is your response to the fact that the states with no collective bargaining for teachers all have the worst education systems in the country? Coincidence? Perhaps. I know such ridiculous coincidences occur in the literary world, but the real world? Not so sure.

His reference to the world of fiction has to do with the fact that I sent him my book of Poker Tales to read. His interpretation of it must be that it was about the world of fiction and not the world of fact. My point in the book, however, was to make as plain as possible just how much fiction there is in the world of fact. I made this point again in my too-long response, which I post in its entirety here:

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Having been an educator, the whole system needs an overhaul. After all, they let me teach.

Seriously, the whole notion of ‘one-size-fits-all’ for which unions are advocating is broken. Unions may have been necessary in the age when progressives ruled the roost (a hundred years ago), but they, and the Marxist principles they are founded on, need updating.

As I say on my blog, I have no problem with Marx as a thinker, but in the modern day, there are some contradicting principles that should make Marxists sit up and take notice of their shortcomings. Instead, the union followers of Marx, continue to advocate for equality at the EXPENSE of the economy. This is not a necessary divide, but it is one that both sides push for. It comes from the systematic exclusion of some humanistic principles from a humanistic education.

Where, for instance, is the push for economic education as part of a liberal arts curriculum? You won’t find it, because economics is involved with the unequal distribution of resources in a ‘he-who-knows-more-gains-more’ model. So it is excluded from the general education model; economic eduation is reserved for selfish specialists, who have no interest in the old-time wisdom of ancient Greece.

That’s a shame, because it means the betrayal of the educational ideal, which is not to be fair, but to encompass all knowledge. When knowledge changes, we are supposed to change our approach to knowledge. Instead, academics have increasingly closed themselves off from any principles that do not agree with their own initial premise about what should be taught in school. So the humanities has stopped teaching everything that a person should know for what academics think is important for all people to know. And the rest of ‘us’ are configured, not as having a different opinion, but as being evil. This at a time in which wealth creation is on a tear and union membership is on the wane and when even Obama is giving lip service to job creation as the foundation of the American economy.

This is a problem specifically for Marx, because he is a follower of Rousseau, who believed (falsely, I hope you will agree) that the only thing standing in the way of a natural distribution of resources was the build up of artificial boundaries (like property and wealth). All Karl and Jean-Jacques had to do to restore natural equity was to go to war with the emerging class of the petty bourgeois and all would be okay. That introduces a chink into the American wall. One side is all for building wealth, while the other side is all suppressing it in favor of natural equity.

That system only works if the evaluation of nature and artifice is correct. But, as I hope you recognize, the message of my book is that between our minds and the truth comes an inexorable layer of imagination, which we cannot get rid of, despite our best efforts. In fact, if you push too far into ‘the truth,’ you lose sight of alternatives. That’s why both Rush Liimbaugh and Al Franken claim that they have the ‘truth’ and the other side is lying. In this Enlightenment configuration of ‘the truth,’ it is ALWAYS the fault of others; never the fault of ourselves. That’s why I maintain that I am not a political. This seems endemic to politics and politicians on both sides of the two misconfigured aisles.

So unions continue to fight for what they want without sufficient (I am not so uncharitable to say no) regard to their own deficiencies. In a universe in which everyone is fighting for their share of the public pie, there is no incentive to cooperate and no one ultimately wins. Unions may be the best we can hope for in the pursuit of equity (although I seriously doubt it, just as I seriously doubt that extending your premise to all possible forms of education would reveal that union-based education is the best of all possible worlds), but it is not the only solution conceivable. As long as they hang onto their sinking ship, they will continue on their downward slope to obsolescence.

All the arguments in the world against the position that you think I hold won’t change the facts on the ground. Union members would be better off doing a little more rethinking of their initial premises than they currently are.

Categories: History, Philosophy, Politics
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