Wisconsin’s early spring elections for its Supreme Court were historically sleepy affairs, with minimal implications outside the Badger State.
Not this year.
While the state’s abortion law and its congressional redistricting process are getting attention, next Tuesday’s ostensibly nonpartisan election between Democrat Susan Crawford and Republican Brad Schimel is shaping up to be a belated referendum on Act 10, the sweeping cost-saving reforms enacted under Gov. Scott Walker in 2011.
A socialist hotbed in the early 20th century, Wisconsin in 1959 was the first state to pass a law allowing public-sector collective bargaining — that is, the unionization of government employees.
In the private sector, a labor union can only demand what a company is able to pay. Insist on too much, and prices risk going higher than customers are willing to spend. But that normal balance doesn’t exist in government, where officials almost reflexively pass these costs on to taxpayers.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images