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Government unions: Are the patients running the asylum?

Peter Meyer
6.22.2011

Don't miss this morning's front-page New York Times story on public unions. ?Writer Charles Duhigg offers a comprehensive report on the mess we've gotten ourselves into by giving away public money, we now don't have, to public unions, which want more.? Duhigg understands the fundamental, and anti-democratic,? paradox in public unions' DNA:

[P]ublic workers have a unique relationship with elected officials, because government employees are effectively negotiating with bosses whom they can campaign to vote out of office if they don't get what they want. Private unions, in contrast, don't usually have the power to fire their members' employers.

Therein lies a problem.

--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

Tags: New York

Peter Meyer is an adjunct fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Meyer is also a former News Editor of Life magazine and the author of numerous nonfiction books, including the critically acclaimed The Yale Murder (Empire Books, 1982; Berkley Books, 1983) and Death of Innocence (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985; Berkley Books, 1986). Over the course of his three-decade journalism career Meyer, who…

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