- Another Thing Mike Bloomberg Is Dead Wrong About

I think in that alternate universe where Spock has a goatee and Evil Kirk rules with an iron fist, there is a guy who looks like Mike Bloomberg who I would get along with just great. To me it looks like we got the evil Bloomberg and they got the one who respects the individual and thinks government should leave people alone. And in the meantime, we got the impossibly arrogant dwarf sized butt-insky who's primary personal goal is to strip all Americans of the right to defend themselves.

Here, the diminutive Mayor of New York City says that the problem isn't the unions but the pay. If it were anyone else I'd say he was just pandering to New York's extremely liberal populace, but Bloomberg doesn't pander. He doesn't care enough about what people think to bother. Ordinarily you'd have to admire that but in his case it's like admiring Mao for not caring what the Tibetan's think.

The fact is, it's the unions which are the real source of the problem and not the pay. Pay itself is important. But If you get rid of the unions then you can make the civil service begin to respond to the real world, and part of that will be rational pay mechanisms. Instead of seniority and 'degree's earned' being the only metrics, you can begin to pay the good teachers more, the worse teacher less, and fire the worst of them. all judged by objective standards instead of whatever the union thinks matters.

Pay is important. But if you're interested in the quality of service offered by government employees then the unions have at least as serious a detrimental effect in that area as they do on creeping compensation. Unions have two purposes not just one. The first is to increase pay (costs) absent other economic input. The other is to decrease accountability absent other managerial input.

And the second purpose is the reason that Mike Bloomberg is 100% wrong... again... as usual.