Neoliberalism Hates People

Word on the street is that 

its looking as if Tuesday’s budget speech will announce the de facto privatization UW Madison, so that’ll be fun too.

This is just an insanely bad idea.  It ranks up there with the insanely bad ideas that take up the rest of the bill that any decent centrist, like Obama, who of necessity ought condemn the blatant assault on unions, even as you promote unnecessary austerity measures. Unless, of coures, you're Matthew Ygelsias and have no idea what's going on in Wisconsin. Concluding his post about the events here, he writes that

[w]hen conservatopia arrives and kids all go to for-profit schools where they’re taught by non-unionized teachers, the school operators’ trade association will have all the same sometimes problematic incentives that the National Education Association has today. Heck, it’ll probably even be called the National Education Association. But instead of being a “union” that promotes high levels of education spending in sometimes inefficient ways plus egalitarian social policies, it’ll be a “business association” that promotes high levels of education spending in sometimes inefficient ways plus regressive social policies.

I realized that as a long-time foe of teachers' unions, it's tough for Yglesias to see the series of insanely bad ideas pouring out of the Koch foundation's Scott Walker, but it's all workers, from the janitorial staff to the mail room to the doctors and nurses prison guards bus drivers and so forth. Relatedly, unions aren't responsible for inefficient spending; they don't adopt books and new technologies or fall for the expensive scams of vouchers and charter schools.  The inefficient spending is the work of hacks who think they can end a "crisis" in education by importing the Olive Garden model, firing a lot of teachers, or some other load of bullocks.

In the same post, he "argues" that

[b]ut the political system has a strong tendency toward equilibrium. Democrats will keep getting enough money to stay in business and will keep winning approximately half the elections. It’s just that in post-union America, rich businessmen will be the only viable sources of political funding. So to an even greater extent than is the case today, politics will take the form of “culture war” battles or “sector versus sector” fights (pharmaceutical companies’ support for the Affordable Care Act is probably the shape of things to come) over rents in which the fundamental interests of rich businessmen qua rich businessmen are off the table.

He doesn't read anyone to his left so he is probably unaware that this version of political life, in which the state becomes the business manager of the property holder - as some classical economist once put it, is precisely the criticism leveled by everyone to his left. Having worked so hard to undermine teachers' unions and unions more generally, Ygleasias can take a victory lap and this latest victory over people.

Unions Yes: