Charles Krauthammer on the real effect of the results of the Wisconsin recall election: Less membership and money for the public sector unions and for the Democrats!

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: June 7, 2012

Tuesday, June 5, 2012, will be remembered as the beginning of the
long decline of the public-sector union. It will follow, and parallel,
the shrinking of private-sector unions, now down to less than 7 percent
of American workers. The abject failure of the unions
to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) — the first such failure in
U.S. history — marks the Icarus moment of government-union power. Wax
wings melted, there’s nowhere to go but down.

The ultimate significance of Walker’s union reforms has been
largely misunderstood. At first, the issue was curtailing outrageous
union benefits, far beyond those of the ordinary Wisconsin taxpayer.
That became a nonissue when the unions quickly realized that trying to
defend the indefensible would render them toxic for the real fight to
come.

So they made the fight about the “right” to collective
bargaining, which the reforms severely restricted. In a state as
historically progressive as Wisconsin — in 1959, it was the first to
legalize the government-worker union — they thought they could win as a
matter of ideological fealty.

But as the recall campaign
progressed, the Democrats stopped talking about bargaining rights. It
was a losing issue. Walker was able to make the case that years of
corrupt union-politician back-scratching had been bankrupting the state.
And he had just enough time to demonstrate the beneficial effects of
overturning that arrangement: a huge budget deficit closed without
raising taxes, significant school-district savings from ending cozy
insider health-insurance contracts, and a modest growth in jobs.

The
real threat behind all this, however, was that the new law ended
automatic government collection of union dues. That was the unexpressed
and politically inexpressible issue. That was the reason the unions
finally decided to gamble on a high-risk recall.

Without the
thumb of the state tilting the scale by coerced collection, union
membership became truly voluntary. Result? Newly freed members rushed
for the exits. In less than one year, ­AFSCME, the second-largest
public-sector union in Wisconsin, has lost more than 50 percent of its
membership.

It was predictable. In Indiana, where Gov. Mitch
Daniels (R) instituted by executive order a similar reform seven years
ago, government-worker unions have since lost 91 percent of their
dues-paying membership. In Wisconsin, Democratic and union bosses (a
redundancy) understood what was at stake if Walker prevailed: not
benefits, not “rights,” but the very existence of the unions.

So
they fought and they lost. Repeatedly. Tuesday was their third and last
shot at reversing Walker’s reforms. In April 2011, they ran a candidate
for chief justice of the state Supreme Court who was widely expected to
strike down the law. She lost.

In July and August 2011, they ran recall elections of state
senators, needing three to reclaim Democratic — i.e., union — control.They failed.
(The likely flipping of one Senate seat to the Democrats on June 5 is
insignificant. The Senate is not in session and won’t be until after yet
another round of elections in November.)

And then, Tuesday, their
Waterloo. Walker defeated their gubernatorial candidate by a wider
margin than he had — pre-reform — two years ago.

The unions’
defeat marks a historical inflection point. They set out to make an
example of Walker. He succeeded in making an example of them as a
classic case of reactionary liberalism. An institution founded to
protect its members grew in size, wealth, power and arrogance, thanks to
decades of symbiotic deals with bought politicians, to the point where
it grossly overreached. A half-century later these unions were
exercising essential control of everything from wages to work rules in
the running of government — something that, in a system of republican
governance, is properly the sovereign province of the citizenry.

Why
did the unions lose? Because Norma Rae nostalgia is not enough, and it
hardly applied to government workers living better than the average
taxpayer who supports them.

And because of the rise of a new
constitutional conservatism — committed to limited government and a more
robust civil society — of the kind that swept away Democrats in the
2010 midterm shellacking.

Most important, however, because in the
end reality prevails. As economist Herb Stein once put it: Something
that can’t go on, won’t. These public-sector unions, acting, as FDR had feared,
with an inherent conflict of interest regarding their own duties, were
devouring the institution they were supposed to serve, rendering state
government as economically unsustainable as the collapsing entitlement states of southern Europe.

It
couldn’t go on. Now it won’t. All that was missing was a political
leader willing to risk his career to make it stop. Because, time being
infinite, even the inevitable doesn’t happen on its own.