I stand with John Hinderaker at Powerline and his call to make public worker unions illegal once again – as they should be.

For the large majority of our history, public employee unions have been illegal. It is only since the 1960s and 1970s that they have been allowed. Currently, they are legal in roughly half the states. The United States has carried on a four-decade experiment in legalization, and the results are in: public employee unions are a cancer on our country.

Public employee unions flourish because government is, by its nature, a monopoly. Thus, there is no need for unionized government units to compete against non-unionized units. Moreover, public officials who negotiate with public employee unions generally lack the same incentives that private employers have to keep costs down. The result has been a fiscal disaster, with numerous states and municipalities now going over the waterfall of bankruptcy.

All these unions do is siphon our hard earned tax dollars from the salaries of civil servant to fund political propaganda machines. It is a complete scam. Civil servant compensation, work conditions, processes, etc is set by legislation. And too many times unions drift into political topics which are of no direct consequence to their charter – like whether we should be at war with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Too many times unions use our tax dollars to foil the will of the people. And as we saw in NY City this week, they risk lives with their selfish, pouting protests.

It is all a political propaganda scam:

Officials say the fast-growing union spent $85 million during the campaign season last year, and that it was well worth it: The Obama administration has appointed union officials to top posts and is backing legislation to make it easier for workers to organize.

There is no ‘organizing’ in civil servant jobs. Worse yet, civil servants have actual legal clout over private sector workers attempting to do the jobs the government needs done (few civil servants do more than monitor outside contractors or push the mountains of paperwork congress has mandated – and ignores). This means unionized and none unionized civil servants can (and do on many occasions) threaten companies with retribution if they do not do what is told – no matter the consequences financially.

This is the prime source of government waste, right up their with private company greed and incompetence (its evil cousin). I know from personal experience and easily accessed OIG reporting how civil servants can team up with unethical private companies and produce all sorts of graft and failure. I have seen disastrous projects stumble on and on for years, as millions or billions keep flowing into ‘the matrix’ of government contractors and their lobbying firms. Here is one quarter’s report from the NASA OIG to give a sample of what goes on in government contracting.

Can you envision the damage and greed that could be done if there was a union structure coordinating intimidation and kickbacks across the federal bureaucracy along with a political machine that controlled the legislature campaigns and the courts? It would be the end of America and its individual freedoms.