Catching Up: Our Riots

I think one of the points of difference on the arguments over public sector workers is who you imagine first when you read that phrase. If you imagine teachers, police, firefighters, and so forth, you're liable to be strongly in favor of anything they ask. If you imagine "soulless" bureaucrats, men at "work", and other quotation-mark-laden drones whose job is to live off the public trough, you'll love sticking it to "the man." Is there some way to separate them? And, of course, avoiding the political economy theater brilliantly portrayed more than 25 years ago by Yes, Prime Minister (part 1, 2, 3).

“Government-employee unions have vastly more power than do private-sector unions because the entities they work for are typically monopolies.”

Why the Wisconsin demonstrations are like the Tea Party (HT Sumner):

The advent of the labor movement is at the heart of the left’s sacred creation myth. The sense on the left that unions are under siege gives them something to fight for with a bracing sense of historically-rooted identity and moral authority. Similarly, the sense on the right that America’s foundational values are under siege gave the Tea Party something to fight for with a bracing sense of historically-rooted identity and moral authority. Of course, the Tea Party has about as much to do with the values of the American founding as John Adams has to do with Raytheon, and public-sector unionism has about as much to do with preventing worker exploitation as Eugene Debs has to do with unfireable $100,000 a year public-school teachers.

Different measures disagree on whether public sector or private sector employees are better compensated. Here are comparisons, depending on which you think is most comparable. (HT Marron)

What teachers make, version 1; version 2; version 3;