Dan Henninger and Roger Kimball on the role of government

Dan Henninger is a thoughtful columnist at the WSJ.  Today he identified here the root cause of much of our difficulty governing ourselves - the marriage of the public service unions and  the Democrat Party which dates from the signing of an Executive Order by JFK in 1962.  This Executive Order 10988 allowed the public service employees to unionize for the first time.  In some cases the new union members could not strike (recall the FAA controllers who were fired by Ronald Reagan for leaving their posts, or going on strike illegally) but only a few.  The idea that government workers could ban together and threaten to shut down the government changed the political scene by allowing the party of unions, the Democrat Party, to take up their cause and begin the tax and spend spiral that has led us to the bankruptcy of California and for that matter the rest of the blue states.  I remember vividly a conversation I had with a lawyer friend in 1973, after our family moved to California, that no good would come of the fact that California had passed a state law based upon the JFK EO.  New York had just begun it's rapt decline under Mayor John Lindsay who caved over and over to the now powerful unions in New York City.  The country is broke now and the primary cause is the alliance of these pubic service unions and the Democrat Party.  Scott Brown's election was an acknowledgement of the failure of this alliance.  It remains to be seen if the Republican Party can forge an anti-union alliance and stop the tax and spend strategy of the dems and public service unions.

On the same theme of controlling the government size and influence in our lives, Roger Kimball  here weighs in on Obama's philosophy of governance and why the struggle between those who want a bigger role for government and those who want a minimalist role is now out in the open and better defined as a result of the Scott Brown victory.

In defense of business

Anyone who has been active in business, or still is active, is amazed at the vitriol spent by many liberals demeaning companies' greed, etc.  here is an article that effectively debunks all that negativism and makes a few points that should be brought to the attention of all business naysayers.