The Anger of the Public

Concerned Citizen over at the Western Rifle Shooters Association has a great piece up that highlights an article in Pajamas Media by Victor Davis Hanson which explores why Americans are so angry. A quote:

There is a growing sense that government is what I would call a new sort of Versailles — a vast cadre of royal state and federal workers that apparently assumes immunity from the laws of economics that affect everyone else.

In the olden days, we the public sort of expected that the L.A. Unified School District paid the best and got the worst results. We knew that you didn’t show up at the DMV if you could help it. A trip to the emergency room was to descend into Dante’s Inferno. We accepted all that in other words, and went on with our business.

But at some point — perhaps triggered by the radical increase in the public sector under Obama, the militancy of the SEIU, or the staggering debts — the public snapped and has had it with whining union officials and their political enablers who always threaten to cut off police and fire protection if we object that there are too many unproductive, unnecessary, but too highly paid employees at the Social Service office. In short, sometime in the last ten years public employees were directly identified with most of what is now unsustainable in the U.S. The old idea that a public servant gave up a competitive salary for job security was redefined as hitting the jackpot.

That anger extends to State governments as well. When NC had a budget shortfall, the first response was to raise taxes. (For anyone who drives through our fair State, take warning, do not violate by a jot or tittle any of the traffic laws. The police, in an effort to get more money out of us, have turned law enforcement into tax collection.) I heard over and over again that if we had to shrink our lifestyle because of the economy, why so should the State-and not through reduction of legitimate services, but through reduction of benefits.

Read the whole thing. It is worth it.