“The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. … The truth is, there’s lots of money to go around. Lots. It’s just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates.” Filmmaker Michael Moore uttered those words last week at a rally to preserve “collective bargaining” with respect to benefits for Wisconsin’s state and local government employee unions. In that context, “collective bargaining” means exempting government spending on union members from the normal democratic process that controls all other government spending.
Moore’s speech was mostly nonsense. He declared, for example, that the protests were about workers’ right to “bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours’ sleep so he or she can do their job.” In fact at least the last two things are not at issue in Wisconsin at all.
