Editor’s note: This viewpoint is a commentary on Conor O’Farrell’s column, “Why unions?…” which appearred in the Nov. 15 issue of the Town Crier.

I read with disappointment the above referenced article because I had hoped for some meat on the bone to chew on, maybe a zesty tete-a-tete to get some of my own back after Black Tuesday of late. Instead I got rhetorical nonsense that read like a 50-year-old Denny’s menu.

First, [Mr. O’Farrell] predictably recites the history of unions and the abuses of past employers as if Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was a new release.

This is a simple rhetorical device to get you agreeing with him and make it easier to get you to drink the Kool-Aid that follows.

I was hoping for some particularly clever brew, but alas, he dusted off a standard false dichotomy by dividing the entire population into to groups, greedy management and the “working class.” Golly gee, you don’t want to be one of the greedy owners and managers, do you, Little Billy?

President Obama used this false division between the honest working class and the evil rich to vilify Romney, with manifest success for his re-election and obvious fragmentation of our country.

For the record, I do not know any owner or manager of a business who is not only a member of the working class, but is also the hardest worker of all. That’s what it takes to be the employer, try it some time and prove me wrong.

Simply stated, Conor is working on a woefully outdated and deceitful paradigm, as he must in order to justify the unions’ existence. The simple fact is, since state and federal law has rendered most of the unions’ goals passé, their existence is largely moot.

They would vehemently deny that of course, since they must not show us how their goals have morphed into statewide shakedowns financed with money purloined from their members.

His entire union construct is a house of double-faced cards. Why does he feel limiting somebody’s, anybody’s, success is appropriate? Why would he proffer a bizarre connection between profit ratio and vice, as if a private company that is too successful, by necessity must be evil?

Condemning success for its own sake, even when labor is getting their fair shake, is a bizarre and increasingly dangerous ploy used by union apologists and secular progressives to justify the legal theft that is the best descriptor for our current excess taxation for their unique benefit.

Finally, I find it all too predictable, but no less egregious, that he ignores the elephant in the living room — the public sector unions — and the largess bestowed on them and funded by excessive taxes levied on the same working class Conor says the unions care about.

How Orwellian, some animals really are more equal than others, ne c’est pas?

With respect to the greedy and outrageous public sector unions, where is the evil management? Where are the greedy owners oppressing you? Conor has no straw man to shoot arrows at, so he is smart enough to be silent.

Did he think we didn’t notice? I know, I know ...

Neal Simpson, M.D.
Hemet

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