Che sera, sera.

So the Boston Teachers are planning a one day strike. For a group that is always proclaiming their devotion to the children, this is shocking. Well, no it is not. A union exists for the same reason any business does, to maximize value to its owners.

I grew up in a union family. My grandfather had a hand in starting one. As someone who at least has libertarian tendencies, I know I am supposed to hate the union. I vaguely remember hearing years ago on TV Milton Friedman speak about how unions were eventually irrelevant as automation and some other factors would end up causing workers to become superfluous. I guess he was right. My guess is that dad and his co workers did as well as they did more because their work demanded a good deal of intelligence and thus the pool of workers was not vast. At the very least, I suspect their union activity did them and the company little harm.

Teachers postal workers and all the vast panoply of paper shufflers employed at all levels of government are a different story. I forget where I read the words of C.S. Lewis wherein he said that under socialism, every strike was a civil war. Solidarity proved that in Poland and the socialists lost a civil war, at least temporarily. Our situation is different. Government and government employee unions are in a neverending civil war against .........us. That is, the rest of the population that is not civil service or connected in some way in say, think tank land.

One might posit that this cannot last forever. In theory, I might agree. It would appear that, as the day gets closer when almost all citizens and a good deal of the legal and even some illegal aliens are employed by Holy Mother State and there are only a few hundred people actually working and producing and paying astronomical taxes, something has to give. Certainly, there would be some justice in the spring finally snapping and sending the pieces flying everywhere. It would get ugly and I for one hope that something doesn't give.

Maybe the few geniuses the creeping idiocracy still produces will bring about Ray Kurzweil's singularity and pull our fat from the fire. Maybe Greg Cochran's coming abundance will happen. Maybe the smart guys who run the fed do know what they are doing. I hope so. I like myself enough that as much as the system might deserve to die, I do not wish it, The collapse will not be happy for moi, or, may I say, vous.