Manhattan Institute’s Steve Malanga wrote an excellent piecein yesterday’s WSJ, examining the increasing power of public sector unions to use their political clout to fill their trough, gobble the tax dollars down, then see that it’s refilled with even more money. He mentions that the old-time union leader George Meany at one time opposed the unionization of public sector workers. Apparently he could foresee that public sector unionism would eventually become so “successful” that it would wind up hurting the pocketbooks of his private sector union workers, who have to pay taxes to cover the bloated and uncontrollable costs imposed by unionized government employees.

That brings to mind a point made by Murray Rothbard. He said that Marx wasn’t entirely wrong in seeing a class struggle in society, but just got the classes wrong. It isn’t a conflict between capital owners and workers, but instead a conflict between tax payers and tax consumers. A hard working electrician (union or not) who has his paycheck drained to help keep all the public education establishment’s retinue of hangers-on employed at fine salaries, would probably understand.

Rand also understood this conflict. She said it was the moochers versus the producers.