Michigan

Michigan has spanked the unions and defeated provisions that would have seen unions given veto control over state laws. It is astonishing that unions can spend so much of members money campaigning on patch protection measures.

Unions went for broke in Michigan and they lost big time.

Michigan voters soundly defeated a measure that would have given public-sector unions a potent tool to challenge any law — past, present or future — limiting their benefits and powers. It would also have permanently barred Michigan from becoming a right-to-work state where payment of dues is no longer required as a condition of employment in unionized companies.

Will this defeat now open the right-to-work floodgates?

Although both sides raised a whopping $20-plus million for their campaigns, ultimately the proposal lost by a wide margin because of opposition across the political spectrum. Both theDetroit News and the Detroit Free Press, the state’s flagship conservative and liberal papers respectively, counseled a “no” vote. The Free Press, usually an ardent supporter of collective- bargaining rights, concluded: “Michigan just can’t afford those kinds of limitations in an era when debt from pension and health obligations to current and retired employees are pushing many local governments to the brink of insolvency.”

All of this would have rung the death knell for the last two years of fiscal reforms by GovernorRick Snyder, a moderate Republican, paving the way for future tax increases on individuals and businesses. This would have been economically devastating for Michigan, which went into a recession several years before the rest of the country — and is only now beginning to post a slow recovery. Its unemployment is still about a point above the national average.

The unions may wish they had never overplayed their hand in this battle. They were field-testing a strategy to take back existing right-to-work states that allow legislative action through ballot referendums.

I read this post at Federalist Paupers and thought about the parallels here in new Zealand after the tragic killing of Rosemary Ives. There were a great many calls from gun-grabbing liberals for tighter controls on firearms, without them thinking that the controls were quite tight enough and that Andrew Mears broke every single one of them with his stupid action. The point was missed utterly about how few people actually get killed or injured during hunting, and the fact that it is actually more dangerous driving to recreational areas than being in them.

The post at Federalist Paupers nicely provides some numbers and some facts that counteracts the gun-grabbers. The post also nicely shows why no one will ever successfully cow the United States, either politically or externally.

The state of Wisconsin has gone an entire deer hunting season without someone getting killed. That’s great. There were over 600,000 hunters.

Allow me to restate that number. Over the last two months, the eighth largest army in the world – more men under arms than Iran; more than France and Germany combined – deployed to the woods of a single American state to help keep the deer menace at bay.

But that pales in comparison to the 750,000 who are in the woods of Pennsylvania this week. Michigan’s 700,000 hunters have now returned home. Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia, and it is literally the case that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.

These numbers are part of why those of us who grew up in rural parts of the country simply don’t comprehend the gun-grabbing impulses of some. Every single year, millions of Americans carry high power rifles into the woods and more or less do as they please – some shoot at deer, some just drink a lot – and it is a complete non-story. The number of people injured and killed by these guns will pale in comparison to those injured and killed in driving accidents during the same time period.

But however well or badly we handle our guns, woe will befall he who thinks he can conquer America. 500 years ago, Machiavelli compared ancient Persia with then-modern France. Persia was highly centralized, so the emperor was firmly in control of all parts of his realm, and could muster enormous numbers of men to any part of the country. But if you could defeat that army and the central authority that raised it, then you would almost immediately control the whole nation, as Alexander showed. Medieval France, on the other hand, was very decentralized, with petty dukes controlling small centers of power throughout the country. Because of this, the king of France had only marginal control over vast swaths of his country , but no invader could stand a chance at conquering France because of all the small bands of local opposition.

I wish N.M. was around today, if only to hear the praise he would have for a nation that every year assembles and then disbands the world’s largest army purely for the purpose of managing its deer population. For millenia, philosophers have pondered how one can maintain a well-armed population that can fend off all attackers, while simultaneously maintaining ordered governance.  In America, we’ve fulfilled this dream, and we’ve done it so well and so effortlessly that no one seems to have noticed.

That kind of puts things into perspective and shows up the nonsense of the gun-grabbing liberal elite who have never had the pleasure of  tracking, and matching guile and stealth with deer or any other animal. Ironically the same greenie gun-grabbers that want to stop hunters are also the ones wanting to rid the country of deer and other pests, they seem quite happy to dump literally thousands of tonnes of toxic poison on our forests but don’t want people to enjoy the outdoors and dispatch a few pests along the way.

In the US deer hunting, for example, is largely limited to defined seasons. Here in New Zealand we would be better to manage our deer populations by changing the laws to remove them from the noxious pest list and to instead create a new tourism industry encouraging people to come to Ne Zealand seeking trophy animals. The only thing stopping this is the dogmatic instance of DoC and the green lobby for the total eradication of deer from New Zealand, something that is unachievable and un-needed.

It is high time that the facts were shown to politicians in a meaningful way and that isn’t through Peter Dunne. He pretends to support hunters and fisherman and yet he hasn’t done a single thing for them. Far better would be the establishment of list of hunting and fishing friendly MPs, so that people who enjoy the outdoors can see for themselves whether or not their local MP is on their side or not.