Wisconsin's Lesson ... Self-Government Not Dead ... The Word of the Day is SUBSIDIARITY (not to be confused with subsidiary)

A Victory for Self-Government is subtitled 'In Wisconsin, voters defeat a campaign of union revenge:'

"The resounding failure by unions and Democrats to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker on Tuesday is a significant moment for democratic self-government. It shows that an aroused electorate can defeat a furious and well-fed special interest that wants a permanent, monopoly claim on taxpayer wallets.

The crisis unfolding in Europe is less about the euro than it is about whether the union-dominated entitlement state can reform so it can pay its bills. In Wisconsin as in Greece and France, unions and the political left were trying to demonstrate that power and privileges once granted are eternal. They wanted to run Mr. Walker out of Madison as an object lesson that trying to limit collective bargaining and mandatory dues collection for government unions will end your political career.

One of the stranger analyses of the Wisconsin brawl has been that it could have been avoided if only Mr. Walker had sought "consensus." We're all in this together, yada, yada. Tell that to Governor John Kasich, who passed similar reforms in Ohio to much less fanfare, only to see unions use a referendum last year to repeal his collective-bargaining changes. Public unions are never going to cede their dominance over taxpayers without a fight.

And it's worth recalling how brutally they fought. They occupied the state capital for weeks. They harassed GOP lawmakers and their families, tried to recall state Senators and defeat a conservative Supreme Court judge, while Democratic lawmakers abdicated their legislative duty by fleeing the state. They lost in the end because Mr. Walker and Republicans rode out the storm, passed their reforms, and are now able to show Wisconsin voters the beneficial results.

The longer-term impact of Mr. Walker's vindication will depend on the lesson other political leaders take from it. Some 30 states allow collective bargaining for public unions, and removing that power is the kind of core reform that makes spending control, school choice and property-tax reductions easier. It should be a major goal of reformers who want to limit the size of government."

My Take

It's all about the public sector big union dominated entitlement state versus the taxpayer-in-charge subsidiarity mind-set.

Subsidiarity simply means that work is always best accomplished at the lowest level of competent authority.

Decentralizing as much as possible should always be the main idea behind how work is organized and responsibilities are apportioned.

In that regard, big centralized unions are a negative force for those they represent, as well as the general public.

As a result, they now appear to be losing some of their former appeal to public sector workers.

They've already lost much of their appeal to the general public.

Subsidiarity

But there's an even bigger lesson to be learned from the Wisconsin recall vote than the one about big unions.

We the People need to "think small" with respect to self governance, competence, decentralization and the blessings of liberty.

As we think individually and think self reliance,We the People will make our own decisions better than anybody else can make them for us.

We must trust ourselves and each other to do what's right and not delegate those decisions to large and impersonal institutions of any kind.

Summing Up

Hopefully, someday soon the days of "bigness" will be replaced with the days of emphasizing smallness and individual freedom of choice.

Big unions, big government, big school districts, and even many big corporations need to be viewed as problems needing solutions.

If scale or bigness brought about efficiency or effectiveness, the federal government's bureaucracy would be a model thereof. Instead it's a model of waste and consists of government knows best big spenders of OPM.

Big unions are a lot like big government. In both cases, leadership has lost touch with reality.

Somewhere along the way we've apparently forgotten about those simple yet profound concepts of entrepreneurship and simplicity, local control as preferable to centralization, and the power of MOM thinking as superior to the impersonal and institutional mind-set of OPM.

It's an appropriate and necessary time to embrace self reliance, and yesterday Wisconsin voters led the way by refusing to blindly follow the lead of big public sector unions.

So when in doubt about how to organize the work that needs doing, let's "recall" the word subsidiarity, and then proceed accordingly.

Thanks. Bob.