Well, that’s interesting. Illinois’s newly inaugurated Gov. Bruce Rauner has thrown down the gauntlet:

Moving beyond rhetoric, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner on Monday issued an executive order that aims at absolving state workers who don’t want to join a union from paying fees that support collective bargaining.

The new governor’s decree effectively attempts to impose right-to-work rules on public employees, an idea Rauner and his pro-business allies also are pursuing for private-sector unions.

My first question is whether Gov. Rauner is acting within his powers in doing this? I’d welcome opinions on that.

It seems to me that there are three questions: the governor’s powers under the state constitution, his powers under statute, and the contents of the state’s contracts with its public employees’ unions.

It appears that I’m not the only one raising these questions:

Anticipating a strong pushback from organized labor, Rauner filed a pre-emptive federal lawsuit in Chicago seeking to have his decision declared legal. But the move likely will spark additional court battles as unions quickly decried the effort as an illegal abuse of power. It’s also possible Democratic lawmakers could vote to overturn Rauner’s executive order.

Under state law, employees can decline to join a union but are still on the hook for “fair share” fees related to collective bargaining and contract negotiations. The idea is that if all employees are getting the benefits from a new contract, everyone should contribute to the cost.

Illinois statute prohibits those fees from being used to support political activities, but Rauner contended it’s nearly impossible to draw a distinction because public sector unions directly negotiate with the government.

Indiana’s former Gov. Mitch Daniels led the way on this back in 2005 and it will be interesting to see how this works out. This is totally consistent with the remarks Gov. Rauner made in his State of the State address, namely that if Illinois is to compete with its neighbors conditions here must be brought more into line with those that prevail among our neighbors.

There’s more commentary on this story at memeorandum.

Update

Wisconsin resident Ann Althouse notes the temperate reaction to the governor’s move from the Illinois Democratic leadership:

Explain the calmness: 1. The Democrats have the majority, so they’ll be in control and need to plot a careful response, 2. The Democrats feel vulnerable in the next election cycle, and Rauner is shining a light on what actually is something of a “corrupt bargain… crushing taxpayers,” and an intemperate reaction would make them look guilty, 3. They know the budget needs hard work, and they rather appreciate Rauner’s taking the front line against the unions, 4. All of the above/something else?

I’d pick door #1 except that I’d stop with “The Democrats have the majority”. Democrats have a super-majority in both houses of the Illinois legislature. It’s well within their power to block anything Gov. Rauner does. Why be intemperate? They have nothing to worry about.

David Ignatius, the augur of the prevailing Washington wisdom, advises caution on continuing diplomacy with Iran. After hearing assertions from both the Iranian foreign minister and President Obama that extending talks past late March would not seem to serve any purposes, he notes:

The seeming impasse raises an unpleasant but essential question: What should the United States and Iran do if the talks fail? My answer would be that, at least initially, both sides would be wise to do nothing. It’s like a labor negotiation where both parties conclude that it’s in their interest to keep working by the old rules even after a contract has expired.

which echoes the observations I’ve made here. He goes on to explain the distance between the two parties on just one of the issues that divide them, the issue of sanctions.

It seems to me that these talks were wildly premature. Can diplomacy succeed in an environment of such mutual mistrust as exists between the United States and Iran? Or when each perceives the others loss as a gain? Those are questions not answers. I’d genuinely like to know more.

There is one thing that puzzles me. See this statement from Mr. Ignatius:

Iranians seem convinced that, with the rise of the terrorist Islamic State, the United States needs Iran’s help in Iraq. But the counterargument could also be made: Iran has chaos on its borders; a rupture in the talks would leave it fighting multiple enemies, with no reliable allies.

Is the rise of DAESH in Iran’s interests or not? If DAESH’s rise is in Iran’s interest (hard for me to fathom), why would they oppose them? To get a few sanctions lifted? To curry U. S. favor? If DAESH’s rise is not in their interest, do they really need negotiations with the U. S. to oppose it? Using something you already plan to do as a negotiating chip to gain further advantage is a time-honored strategy, cf. the recent U. S.-China agreement on global warming.

Eugene Robinson, neither a Republican shill nor enemy of the president, explains the shortcomings of the president’s controversial remarks that the prayer breakfast:

By reaching so far back into history, Obama seemed to echo those who argue that today’s turmoil and terrorism are taking place because Islam has not yet had a Reformation or the Muslim world an Enlightenment. I won’t put words in the president’s mouth. But I will say that, whatever he meant, to compare the depredations of the Islamic State with those of the Crusaders is patronizing in the extreme.

Why? Because Muslims are not slow learners who can be held to only a medieval moral standard. Everyone in the world can be expected to know that it is wrong to burn a helpless human being alive, as Islamic State murderers did to a captive Jordanian pilot. The fact that Joan of Arc met a similar fate in 1431 does not make it improper to “get on our high horse” about unspeakable acts being committed in our time, which makes them our responsibility.

We need to enlist the support of the Muslim community and we won’t do that by absolving them, patronizing them, or trying to insulate them. Anything that allows the greater Muslim community, particularly in Western countries, to remain neutral in the war against DAESH is a strategic error.

Nobel Memorial Award in Economics? Check. Best-selling author? Check. In the New York Times Robert Shiller remarks on the role of what fellow award recipient and best-selliung economist has referred to as “the uncertainty fairy”:

Anyone can tell you that there is no certainty about the effect that new technologies will have on job security in coming decades: There is a risk, but it is hard to quantify for general categories of jobs, and nearly impossible to calculate for individuals. Yet these concerns have effects on investor decision-making through the emotional component of our actions — what John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist, called our animal spirits.

Uncertainties about individual economic fortunes can affect asset prices through an important indirect channel, government policy, which is swayed by popular concerns. Raghuram Rajan, governor of the Reserve Bank of India, in his book “Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy” (Princeton 2010) argued that governments were more tolerant of excessive credit expansion when their citizens were upset about rising inequality. Governments, he said, use expanded credit in a desperate effort to placate a dissatisfied electorate. Credit expansion can create housing bubbles and an illusion of wealth for many people, for a while, at least. The idea is: “Let them eat credit.”

But with rising anxiety about our economic lives and about the state of the markets, we need something more substantial than credit expansion to help us. We all need to think hard about the underlying mechanisms producing individual uncertainty and inequality, and we need to devise financial and insurance plans to help us to deal with whatever looms ahead.

I found a becoming modesty in Dr. Shiller’s op-ed viz.:

There is a great deal that we don’t know about market movements. Interest rates and prices generally reach extreme levels when there is an unusual confluence of many precipitating factors, like anxiety, and others as well. We are usually puzzled by this multiplicity.

And, because markets are really not very efficient, the effect of these varied factors tends to be amplified through emotional feedback.

How do you foster confidence? There are all sorts of ways. A less confrontational Congress. A less activist executive with a greater relish for doing whatever’s necessary to work with the Congress. Modesty would be a good start. Or maybe instituting rules-based regimes rather than the goggles and white scarf approach to economic planning we’ve engaged in for the last couple of decades would be a start.

At the New York Times John Measheimer urges a different policy on our part with respect to Ukraine:

The only way to solve the Ukraine crisis is diplomatically, not militarily. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, seems to recognize that fact, as she has said Germany will not ship arms to Kiev. Her problem, however, is that she does not know how to bring the crisis to an end.

She and other European leaders still labor under the delusion that Ukraine can be pulled out of Russia’s orbit and incorporated into the West, and that Russian leaders must accept that outcome. They will not.

To save Ukraine and eventually restore a working relationship with Moscow, the West should seek to make Ukraine a neutral buffer state between Russia and NATO. It should look like Austria during the Cold War. Toward that end, the West should explicitly take European Union and NATO expansion off the table, and emphasize that its goal is a nonaligned Ukraine that does not threaten Russia. The United States and its allies should also work with Mr. Putin to rescue Ukraine’s economy, a goal that is clearly in everyone’s interest.

If any of that sounds familiar it might be because it’s very consistent with what I’ve been arguing here since the onset of the crisis. That and that I don’t understand why we’re supporting a neo-Nazi junta in Kiev in the chronically corrupt Ukraine.

I doubt that we can reverse course that way but it might be fun to outline a drastically different approach to foreign policy than we’ve used for the last several decades. First, identify a desired, stable end state. Then figure out the steps we’d need to take to get there. Finally, take the steps.

What’s the stable outcome in Ukraine? I think it’s the one the Mr. Mearsheimer has delineated but let’s not stop there. What’s the stable, desired end state in Iran? I don’t think we can have an acceptable not to mention stable end state in Iran that doesn’t involve replacing the theo-fascist regime in charge there with something that’s at least minimally more congenial. Do the talks move events in that direction or into the opposite direction?

How about DAESH? What’s the stable end state? And how can it be effected?

There’s quite a bit of chortling going on at the New York Times’s expense over an editorial that repeatedly refers to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker as “Mr. Scott”. What occurred to me when I saw that is that this is what happens when you’ve got a computer program enforcing the Times’s style rules and the editorial writer consistently wrote “Scott” (as I understand is commonplace in the Wisconsin papers) in reference to the governor.

While I wasn’t paying attention to it, the FCC’s latest moves may have doomed the merger between Time-Warner and Comcast:

So why is the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal doomed? Even before the FCC decided to change how it regulates broadband service providers, the commission redefined what qualifies as a high-speed Internet connection — from 4 megabits per second to at least 25 megabits per second for downloads. Here’s the significance of the new definition: If speeds don’t hit that benchmark, an Internet service provider isn’t allowed to call the connection “broadband.” (The average connection speed in the U.S. is about 10 megabits per second.)

This new standard completely redrew the U.S. market-share map because only cable operators like Comcast, as well as other companies such as Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-Verse and Google Fiber, can currently meet that standard. In this new world, the broadband end of the Internet services spectrum is dominated by just a handful of companies. In the regulatory world, market dominance translates into a lack of competition.

That’s a bitter pill for Comcast, because it’s been saying that there is so much competition for Internet services that consumers have plenty of options before them. Hence, a merger with Time Warner Cable wouldn’t be anti-competitive. The FCC just redefined that notion into oblivion.

It will be interesting to see whether that analysis pans out and what its implications might be for the shape of the Internet service business and its relation to content providers. As I’ve said any number of times, I think that government-granted monopolies (like cable companies) should be barred from the content business but I seem to be in the minority in that view. The whole “net neutrality” issue has certainly created strange bedfellows with anarcho-capitalists rising to the defense of government-granted monopolies while big government fans point out the evils that have been created by big, activist government.

In an analysis at Bloomberg, Justin Fox notes “where the jobs aren’t”:

Even as the economy as a whole was beginning to add jobs in 2010, government — with the exception of a temporary federal hiring spurt for the 2010 Census — was shedding them. Local governments, which have more employees than the states and the federal government combined, had shed 448,000 jobs by June 2013.

The problem with his observation is his horizon. If you change the horizon you’re looking at to consider 2006 to date, you see a somewhat different different picture. Until the late recession state and local governments were on a spending spree. State and local governments have been trimming their payroll back from their peak in 2009 until today they’re just a bit higher than they were in 2006.

IMO the question that should be considered is how many state and local jobs should there be? The metric I’d propose is that the number of state and local employees should rise with income first, population second. That’s a practical necessity for state and local government, most of which are required by law to balance their budgets.

In other words if you want more state and local government employees, you should want incomes to rise.

Charles de Gaulle is said to have remarked “How can you govern a country that has two hundred forty-six varieties of cheese?” I think the question might be asked equally of a country that has 607,380 bridges:
Overall, 98.7 percent of roads get 43 percent of the spending, while the newly built 1.3 percent of roads get 57 percent. As Angie Shmitt pointed out on Streetsblog USA, the math just doesn’t work there.

Calling for more infrastructure spending sounds great, and makes an easy sound bite, but without a coherent plan and sense of priorities, all the money in the world won’t fix what ails America’s roads.

The position I’ve tried to stake out here is that local travellers are in a much better position to determine what roads and bridges need repair than bureaucrats in Washington (or economists in New York) and one way to measure that is by what they’re willing to pay for. The civil engineers’ report is pretty frequently cited by those pointing out how much work there is to be done but the civil engineers are interested parties and tread a fine line between what might be done and what is worth doing.