In the New York Times today three adjacent articles caught my attention.
The House passed legislation to help Unions organize by allowing them to replace secret ballots with non secret ballots. It is asserted that businesses can intimidate union organizers and influence the secret ballot union vote. What is proposed is that Union organizers can approach each employee and ask them to sign a card endorsing the Union, thus bypassing a secret vote. It seems to me that this is merely exchanging the risk of intimidation from one group for another. I don’t like it. We should be moving more towards secret ballots in which the opinion of the individual is private and personal and increasingly free of coercion.
I am not a fan of Unions. I think they are a protection racket that takes tribute in exchange for protecting mediocre or even bad behavior. As a business owner I do what I can to earn the loyalty of the better employees who demonstrate competence and reliability. I do what I can to weed out who do not have or have lost those qualities. It undermines efficiency and excellence to obstruct this process. I believe that one of the main inefficiencies in our education system is the cost of protecting mediocre teachers and administrators.
The solution I see is for Health Insurance and pensions to be delinked from employment and become personally owned and managed. And for affordable education to be readily available for those who need or want to change careers.
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McCain and Obama apparently have an agreement that if they are their parties nominees they will forfeit individual campaign contributions and both use the national campaign finance program. I applaud them putting their money where their mouths are. And I will contribute to their campaigns and to the campaigns of any leading candidate who make a similar commitment. I think that special interest money is the leading obstacle to a fair, balanced, pragmatic legislature.
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The NYTimes/CBS poll, referred to recently by Joe Gandelman, revealed interesting trends in thinking among Democrats, Republicans and Independents about Health Care. What stood out to me was the relatively similar opinions between Dems and Independents as opposed to the relatively difference in opinions between Republicans and Independents. Independents are relatively more in alignment with Democrats than Republicans. I interpret this to mean that someone who considers themselves an Independent rather than a Democrats may generally agree with the aims of the Democrats but may also be in sympathy with the methods and means of the Republicans to optimize free markets and make government more efficient. If the Democrats can keep to the Center and promote genuine reform and transparency they may be able to grow their majority. However if they steer to far to the left in support of Unions and the far left they may watch control of Congress swing back across the aisle.
I am not loyal to a particular party but rather to individual candidates who are most likely to resist special interests and steer a centrist course.
Born 1950, Married, Living in Austin Texas, Semi
Retired Small Business owner and investor. My political interest
evolved out of his business experience that the best decisions come out of an objective gathering of information and a pragmatic consideration of costs and benefits. I am interested in promoting Centrist candidates and Policies. My posts are mostly about people and policies that I believe are part of the solution rather the problem.