This is an addendum to the post below.
As stated; as a public employee, as a public servant, your job, your individual tasks, your pay and the very existence of the department for which you work, exists purely at our (The People’s) pleasure. It is our prerogative to alter this relationship, to dismiss you, or to eliminate your department entirely, at a whim.
As a public servant, you have no “right” whatsoever to a particular salary, or to a particular job, etc. If we decide we must lower your pay or dismiss you altogether, your proper response would be something like; “I understand. Thank you for the opportunity to have served you.” At that point you are free to go your own way and prove your worth in the marketplace as you see fit. May you live long and prosper.
If you decide, on the other hand, to get hostile about it and start in with the name-calling and the threats, what can We The People conclude about the relationship we’ve had with you? Look at me when I’m talking to you!
In private practice, a servant that gets hostile with the home owner will probably result in the police being called in on a domestic disturbance. At the very best it would result in an unflattering reference when you apply for another job. This is OUR house. If the hostility continues and becomes threatening, what are we to do? If the police aren’t able to help us get you public servants under control, well then, what? What are we left with for options in that case? You aren’t going to get your way, let me just put it like that. Not for long, I can tell you. This is OUR country.
At some point, it will have to come to gunshots. Imagine a country with the perverts of the Left no longer alive. We could cut down on law enforcement, since the criminals would be dead, dead, dead. And we wouldn’t have to pay their welfare checks, oh, excuse me, public employee salaries.
In effect, by eliminating the trash, we could form the prototype, at least, of the first truly ungoverned nation.
We have to try everything we can to avoid mass violence. If all I wanted was a war, I wouldn’t be trying to make these points until I had them hog-tied and at the end of a sharp stick. The Other Side sure seems to be trying to pick a fight though, as has been its want.
Liberty can’t be maintained anywhere for long without some bitter fighting, as the enemies of liberty acknowledge nothing but deception and brute force (when deception fails, or when it’s done its job, they go straight to the brute force). The most powerful tools though are knowledge and understanding. That’s where we all come in, each in our own way.
I can get silly though, and tell you that I have thousands of loads of knowledge and understanding, in several calibers, and I know how to get them across. Funny funny har har. But this is a serious discussion.
Many on the left in America, right now, would like nothing better than chaos and mass destruction, and so they are encouraged by the saber rattling. They lust for it, like the playground bully poking and prodding, poking and prodding and taunting, so when someone finally pokes back he can cry false tears and blame his victim. It’s how he gets recognized, and he is starved for attention and more than willing to take a blow or two for it. I’m trying to deny them their pleasure unless they can play right. It’s what adults do, if any there are to be found.
An excellently formulated riposte. It’s time for We the People to marshal some counter-belligerence toward so-called “public servants” (“If there’s anything a public servant hates to do, it’s something for the public.” — Will Rogers). You’ve stated the rationale with maximum concision.
Lyle:
It appears to me that yet another aspect of the problem is that many police forces are actively taking sides, since they are public “servants” as well. The recent kerfuffles at the Wisconsin state capitol are a perfect illustration of the police openly supporting the SEIU/Move-On/ThinkProgress law-breakers.
“If the police aren’t able to help us get you public servants under control, well then, what?”. Even worse, what’ll happen when large numbers of the police actively join them in being OUT of control?
I have to disagree (I think). The people we _elect_ are our public servants. We have allowed those servants to create -massive- bureaucracies at every level of government in order to deliver the pork that buys them more votes in the next election. As part of that incestuous cycle, some of the bureaucrats our “leaders” hire are given contracts of employment per our legal system.
Now, decades into the growth of this vote buying scam, we have teachers and fire fighters and police (to name just a few) who IMHO have been led to believe they have legal recourse against their employers (those vote buying “leaders” we continue to give power) should the legal contracts that employ them be violated.
I think, if current economic trends continue (and I don’t mean the happy talk on MSNBC financial), one of the most interesting to watch trends in our near future will be whether those contracts are violated at the expense of our legal systems credibility (the easy out for our “leaders” and for the voters who believe that these promises don’t matter because they belong to “other people”; ie the contracts are simply defaulted). OR whether we buy people out of contracts we can’t afford at some lower payout amount they can’t afford.
While I believe I’m objective about this I’ll state up front that half my household income (my better halfs) comes from such a contract. Nobodies going to get “sabre rattley” at my house of this but if there’s any default (which would obviously damage the credibility of our legal system and possibly contribute to the “chaos” mentioned above) or lawyering up, then my state will lose one of it’s highly awarded and most skilled K-12 certified teachers.
Eventually the palace eunuchs always get to the point that they think they are running the show.
Sometime they are, sometimes the emperor cuts their throats – depends on the emperor.
We need to figure out what kind of emperor we are.
Boyd; I had the contract thing in mind, and figured someone would bring it up. The come-back would be; just as there should be a prohibition against public servants organizing against The People, so too should there be a prohibition against long-term contracts.
Further; even in private business, when a business goes broke, so do the contracts.
My wife is a public school teacher also, and I would be more than happy to see “public education” (coercively funded education) go the way of the dodo bird.
Further yet, and this is maybe a subject for a separate post; I have served in elected office myself. I was elected president of a local shooting club. THERE WAS NO PAY OR COMPENSATION OF ANY KIND. I TOOK THE JOB BECAUSE I BELIEVED IN IT. I paid out of my own pocket expenses like paper and ink, and I did some of the range maintenance on my own time using my own equipment, fuel and supplies. I was responsible for negotiations with the land owner, acquiring and maintaining insurance, collecting dues and signing up new members. All that while running my own business with two stores and ten employees, and working weekends at night as a sound engineer for a traveling band and with a wife and two young children.
That would be comparable to the governor of your state cleaning the toilets in the capitol building, mowing the lawn, and maintaining the roof and plumbing, etc., all out of his pocket and not yours.
And if someone doesn’t like that, that’s perfectly OK. They are free to mind their own business. In a country with over three hundred million people, I’ve no doubt we can find someone to fill the positions purely out of enthusiasm and not for personal monetary gain.
So I don’t want to hear about long term contracts – the vast majority of those positions shouldn’t have ever existed in the first place, and those that do need to exist can be dealt with annually. Our problem. One of our problems. One of our many big problems, is that we have this silly, horrible, very messed-up and utterly wrong notion of the “career” in government employ. THAT idea MUST be deconstructed. Thee should be no such thing in America. If there is a true want or true need for this or that service, then, ipso-facto, there is a market for it and no government involvement is necessary, nor should it aver be allowed.
Even today, we have these .gov career fuckwits calling, literally, for World War Three, if that’s what it takes to keep the money and benefits rolling in to them at the point of a gun. THAT’S what happens when we allow the creation of government “careers”. It was a foregone conclusion.
A contract, whether long-term, or short, is a promise, whether orally made or written on paper. While they can be enforced, every so often we make a promise we cannot keep, and we have to be released from our original commitments. Sometimes circumstances just conspire against us, and we lose our previous ability to keep our promise. Sometimes we do it because we really think we can keep it, and we just have blind spots for our inabilities, and then we discover that we’ve been stupid and promised too much.
Our governments–federal, state, and local–have largely been stupid when it comes to making promises. We’re coming to the time where it won’t matter: people are going to get hurt, because we’re just not able to keep these promises. Whether it be the cutting of public employee pensions, or the cutting of social security benefits, or just plain inflation–people are going to get hurt.
And the longer we pretend otherwise, the more debilitating the pain is going to be!
“Me and him made a contract that says you’re going to pay me to do this thing he wants done and I’d like to do, or else.”
“If there’s anything a public servant hates to do, it’s something for the public.”
– Will Rogers
As a former officer of the LP Washington I agree Lyle. Sadly we’re a long ways from a reasonable society imho. I want to get there. If we get there fast it will cause or be the result of social upheaval and death on a scale that (I hope) none of us want to ponder. Insulin-dependently yours, -Boyd
to ‘revise and extend’ (sometimes called not leaving well enough alone) what I’m talking about isn’t a problem with public unions or contracts or any of those symptoms. I’m typing about the voters’ history in our country of voting for big promises. -It’s the voters-. The “leaders”, by and large, are just self maximizing individuals who see the market demand and meet it.
Given that history we don’t have a government that can be filled with volunteers. I hope one day we will. -Boyd
Who is this “we the people” you are talking about? You didn’t sign a contract with any civil servants; nobody gave you that authority. You get to carry the standard and speak for others when you man up, actually get people to vote for you, and become a representative. The majority of people in the US don’t vote; apparently your opinions are a minority.
The problem with “this is our country” folks is that everyone wants to be the militia commander, nobody wants to be the cannon fodder. The guy you want to guard the door while you sleep is getting ready to put a bullet in your skull because you used too much toilet paper.
Civilization is compromise. Lincoln and the Army of the Potomac made it quite clear that you, in fact, don’t get the prerogative to enforce your whims, even if you get a few like-minded folks on board.