Insuratitlement

As The Free Agent’s atomic clock ticks down the months (yes, it ticks, as we who own them know) until the purchase of health insurance becomes required by law, she has been contemplating possible parallels between Obamacare and another compulsory insurance scheme, the conglomeration of state and federal programs known as unemployment insurance, or UI.

That the original intent of the 1935 law: to tide over employees who “through no fault of their own” are out of work and are “ready, willing, and able to work”, will engender a guffaw from anyone who knows a working actor in New York.  Almost every employer in the country is required to purchase UI, and premiums are adjusted somewhat based on the employer’s history of layoffs or terminations.  So far, UI looks like insurance: employees who are let go for cause don’t collect and employers’ premiums increase the more they throw people into the system.  The only deviation is the obligation to buy a policy in exchange for the privilege of hiring an employee.

Over time  . . . well, it’s the ‘over time’ that always gets us, of course.  Over time, two trends have shape-shifted UI into as much an entitlement as insurance.   The first is that instances in which an employee’s termination is deemed to be a result of his own actions have grown scarce.  In the District of Columbia, the most governmenty of all jurisdictions, The Free Agent literally never heard of an employee being denied UI.  Take, for example, the case of Chickadee, who drove a truck when The Free Agent was responsible for distribution of Hippy Week.  Acting on an anonymous tip, FA discovered that the water bottle Chickadee carried under her seat was laced with gin.  (Her defense was that she hadn’t drunk from it since she got the rental truck, but only when she was waiting for the place to open at 7am.)  The functionary in Washington, DC, who of course wasn’t spending his own money and virtually couldn’t be fired, asked The Free Agent if she had told Chickadee she mayn’t drink alcohol while driving her truck.  The FA politely replied that all concerned with the getting of driving licenses would have told her that repeatedly.  “How did you know the bottle belonged to her?” he challenged.  “She asked for it back.”  Still, the employer was found to have been negligent in clearly outlining the responsibilities of truck driving, and benefits were awarded.

The second trend has been augmentation of specific UI taxes with other taxes.  The account from which federal civilian and military employees are paid is funded by general revenues, as are the extended benefits Congress has been awarding this election year.  If an insurance company had more claims than premiums could pay, it would have to start paying out of its capital, increasing rates, and possibly declare bankruptcy. Not so, thanks to the good old magic wand stashed at the Longworth office building.

Projecting these two trends from UI onto the health insurance mandate, The Free Agent makes the following predictions.  She realizes she is nowhere near the bendy part of the limb when she predicts that ensuring every American (citizen?) a gold-standard of health care will require regular and large infusions of cash.  Secondly, in the spirit of “the voter is never at fault”, she sees new dedicated taxes for producers of all manner of goods and services which are perceived to add to the expense of that care.  “Tell us about it,” Phillip Morris is sighing, but here (ahem, Mister Bloomberg) is where you can stick it to manufacturers of trans-fats, salt, whiskey, Barcaloungers, and televisions, without actually having to pass bans.  A portion of that revenue could be redirected to the makers of Lipitor, acaí berries, and ThighMasters.  For those of you currently on an extension of an extension of unemployment insurance, may The Free Agent suggest a career change to lobbyist?

The Brew that is True

As you would imagine, the Tea Party movement would love to get The Free Agent’s endorsement, what with her unblemished reputation and mastery of English diction.  But she requires a little more information.

The Tea Party Patriots’ mission statement comprises three points: fiscal responsibility, respect for limited government as defined by the Constitution, and free markets.  The Free Agent applauds this tightly defined agenda, especially because the Tea Party grounds all three in the individual rights Libertarians cherish.  Government debt and give-aways violate our rights to our own earnings, and all power not granted to the federal government or the states is reserved to the people.

But many people who would agree with those ideals in principal would not pass The FA’s withering “everyone’s a libertarian when it comes to their own stuff” test.  (Haven’t we all gone to protests where a bewildering number of placards, while superficially agreeing that the wars, bailouts, Fed, e. g., should end, go on to recommend expanding some other massive government boondoggle?)  It costs nothing to demand that someone else’s access to the public trough be blocked.  What The Free Agent would respect is a polite “no, thank you ever so” to one’s own entitlement.

Therefore, to curry her favor, The Free Agent challenges Tea Partiers to put their funny money where their mouths are and refuse Social Security.  Not everyone will be able to do it, of course, and the FA makes no judgment against those who cash their checks.  We’ve been sold a bill of goods and generations have counted on stewardship of their taxes that turned out to be non-existent.  (For an overview of the Social Security Administration’s business plan, see Bernie Madoff’s indictment.)  But having been a victim of fraud does not give us the right to commit it against the next generation.

Social Security checks can be endorsed to Bureau of the Public Debt and mailed to P.O. Box 2188, Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188.  This is where tax refunds people donate to pay down the debt go to.  (In 2005, 48 tax returns had public debt payments totaling $21,179, compared with 12.8 million that had designations to the presidential election campaign fund.)  Why pay the debt?  Because like it or not, it was incurred in our name by our elected representatives, and paying debts or declaring bankruptcy are the only honorable alternatives for disposing of them.

There it is, Tea Party.  The Free Agent’s kid leather opera-length gauntlet has been thrown down.

The Other Mrs. Indiana Pageant

When The Free Agent isn’t busy advising world leaders, she occasionally checks out what’s showing on the TV machine.  A recent marathon of MTV’s documentary series, “Teen Mom” hooked her like crack.

The show follows four veterans of a previous series, “16 and Pregnant”.  One couple placed their baby with adoptive parents, two couples broke up, and one, Amber and Gary, are as of this week’s episode, still trying to live as a family.  The series focuses on the girls’ struggles to finish high school, find new boyfriends, and get along with the family members upon whom they depend for financial and babysitting support.  While MTV doesn’t sugar-coat their lives at all, neither does it make the hard realities of teen motherhood explicit.

In the first season, Amber and her fiancé Gary shared an apartment with their daughter Leah, and we saw Amber struggle, then give up on finishing high school.  When she got a part-time job at a tanning salon, she found she didn’t have time to keep up with her GED class either.  If she does not go back to school, the chance that Leah will grow up in poverty is 64%, compared to 7% had she been born to a mother who had at least a GED, and whose mother was married and at least 20 years old when she was born.

Children of teen mothers have a 33% dropout rate, almost one in three is diagnosed with depression, 16% will be incarcerated, and 25% will become teen parents themselves.  (Worse yet, some grow up to be president.)  30% of U.S. teens will become pregnant, a rate far higher than any other industrialized nation, twice that, for example, of Canada.

But what has this to do with The Free Agent’s wheelhouse?  Amber and Gary fought constantly, she nagging him to help her more and support her need for time to study.  Gary’s point of view was that since he was supporting the family and they had money in the bank, he was doing his duty.  Finally, Amber had had enough.  “I didn’t want to ask the government for help,” she said, “but I just couldn’t go on fighting with Gary all the time.  It wasn’t good for Leah.”  Engagement broken, Amber found a replacement spouse who gives her no grief and asks only that she fill out paperwork—the state of Indiana.  (Because she works, Amber will also get a big chunk of Earned Income Tax Credit when she files her federal return.)  But she doesn’t experience it as being hopelessly dependent on her fellow citizens.  “I’ve got my own place now,” she says, “and I’m paying the bills.”

The Free Agent will not tell anyone when they may spawn, but neither does she think a birth certificate should come stapled to a blank check on the taxpayers’ account.

In the first episode of season two, by the way, we learn that Gary has lost his job and moved into Amber’s apartment.  The Free Agent is now in a three-way.

Repeal the Civil Rights Act

“Did you hear what your buddy Rand Paul said?” Nude Eel crowed recently.  “He doesn’t think the government can tell him who he can serve in his restaurant, you can’t agree with that!”  Like most Libertarians, The Free Agent is used to this kind of knee-jerk reaction.  Mister Eel, who sees legislation (rather than the judiciary) as the righter of wrongs, makes two errors.  He mistakes Mister Paul and The FA’s viewpoint as being in support of segregation, and he forgets who forced segregation in the first place.

When we cede a power from ourselves to the state, we give it a coin with two sides, that to forbid and that to compel.  The Free Agent responds to Mister Eel that if she acknowledges the authority of the state to compel her to serve someone in her imaginary restaurant, she must also allow it to deny her right to serve.  She would sooner sneer in contempt and boycott a whites-only restaurant than demand the police make it play nice.  She will tolerate people with whom she disagrees in return for the same toleration from them.

Yeah, she said it—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 overreached.  All that was necessary to end Jim Crow was for the Supreme Court to rule that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids it.  What the Civil Rights Act did was use the misbegotten authority to compel a different policy.  In Mister Eel’s world, Jim Crow could return should the political winds shift, in The Free Agent’s, it could not.

Daily, we are ceding too much power to governments at all levels.  If business owners can be forbidden from serving smokers, they could be compelled to allow it.  (New Orleans used to have laws protecting smokers as addicts.)  If we can be compelled to purchase health insurance, it could be made illegal tomorrow.  What we’re giving up is not a decision, it is the authority to make the decision, one way or another.   The Free Agent rarely quotes hippies for obvious reasons, but Power to the People, people!

This Week in Entertainment

The Free Agent hasn’t thought about the most righteous hit “Two Princes” since she wore out the cassette in the 90s, but it’s played through her head all week as she’s listened to Mister Obama and Tim Geithner explain their financial overhaul legislation.  The White House website’s summary includes one obvious dirty bomb, “financial firms won’t be allowed to grow so large that if one fails, it will affect the entire system” and the ninnyism, “No more taxpayer funded bailouts.  If a company can’t make it, it will have to liquidate.”  Finally, AIG’s power to tax has been repealed!  Why is The FA taking the unusual step of awarding this bill a theme song?  It was sung by those adorable, Peruvian ski-capped alt-rockers, The Spin Doctors.

“Roseanne” is one of the top 10 sitcoms in history by The Free Agent’s reckoning, so she was surprised to learn this week that the series wasn’t about what she thought it was about.  Series creator Roseanne Barr told TV Land the show was about the loss of union jobs, with their pensions, and the consequent destruction of the American working class.

She is right that union jobs have declined dramatically, but not just because they deny economic realities.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts 2009 union membership at 12.3% of American workers, more of half of them being government employees, a significant plunge from the high-water mark of 32.5% in 1953.  In the private (aka real) economy, workers have been scraping off union certification like barnacles from a boat hull: even during the recession of 2008, just over half of the decertification elections in the fifteen most active unions were successful.

The only union that won every single one of its challenges—the Association of Federal, State, and Municipal Employees.

By the way, the salad seems to be flying out of Roseanne’s spinner.

Enemies List Update

The Free Agent reluctantly announces that it is now on with Sarah Jessica Parker.  In the first episode of “Work of Art”, a reality competition show she exec-produces, Miss Parker shared with the artestants her motivation for the show.  “I come from a family that loves art, I grew up in a time that the government supported art.”  (Because Miss Parker has been candid about her multitudinous family’s reliance on welfare growing up, it is fair to wonder just how much the taxpayer is obligated to fund her needs, but The Free Agent politely refuses to take that bait.)  Like so many truisms, “government doesn’t support the arts” is not true.

The National Endowment for the Arts was established in 1965 to bring the arts to “all Americans”.  (Hmmm, The FA smells a parallel here, government pursuing unpopular war placates populace with lavish gifts it cannot afford…)  While by its own estimate, it funds only one percent of the nation’s spending on the arts, looking at its annual budget is quick and dirty evidence of the myth of vanishing support for the arts.  The agency started small—of course—with its first budget of $2.9 million.  Mister Obama’s first full-year budget, 2010, funds the agency at $167.5 million, just under a nine-fold increase, adjusted for inflation, and an increase of 31% over the average of the Bush II budgets.    In the intervening years, the agency budget grew steadily, peaking under Bush I, and dipping significantly only during the Clinton years when Republicans controlled the Congress, between 1996 and 2001.

The NEA represents only 1/9^th of the federal government’s spending on the arts, other pieces including the National Gallery, Kennedy Center, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for example.  Combined, 2004 government spending on the arts was $1.5 billion.

And completely unnecessary.  Government’s portion of arts funding is dwarfed by people and agencies willingly spending their own money.  In 2004, 44% of American arts’ organizations’ (an arbitrarily defined assortment including opera, orchestras, not-for-profit theaters, museums, etc.) funding was from ticket sales, and 43% came from individuals, corporations, and foundations.

Without commenting on the value of art, there is no “right” amount of funding, and like Social Security, we find that once the state steps in, recipients never consider it enough.  We can count on vocal and attractive protesters to emerge whenever it is suggested that a federal government that is functionally bankrupt could, for example, possibly drop its support of indigenous tribal interpretations of Hamlet.  Astonishingly, even the new British government is advocating US-style arts funding, based on its need to slash 40% of its non-essential budget.

It is possible Miss Parker’s remark was intended to be an expression of gratitude, in which case, The Free Agent will apologize and end the fatwa.

But regardless of what happens between we two formidable women of the arts, let The Free Agent not be mistaken: The myth of government’s lack of support for the arts is one she believes should immediately be made REALITY!

Sanitation Thugs Mug Queens Man, Then Steal His Aunt’s Car

I’ve blogged previously about one of the more insane aspects of New York’s recycling law, which among other things makes it illegal to “steal” garbage once it’s been left curbside. What I didn’t realize is just how draconian the penalties are for this phony crime. Take, for example, the Middle Village, Queens, man who saw one of his neighbors disposing of an old air conditioner:

“As far as I knew it was a piece of garbage sitting on the curb,” Paul Lawrence said.

But what Lawrence didn’t know when he decided to pick up a discarded air conditioner sitting on the sidewalk in Middle Village, Queens is that once trash hits the curb, it’s technically city property.

And he was breaking the law.

“There was a lady here. I asked the lady can I take the air conditioner. She said go ahead take it. It’s garbage,” Lawrence said.

But not only was he fined $2,000 by a sanitation officer who watched him do it, the car he was driving was impounded.

And its owner — Lawrence’s Aunt, 73-year-old Margaret Colavita, was also slapped with a $2,000 fine.

“I said what is this and she said well we have to serve you with this. You’re the owner of the car and it says I gave him permission,” Colavita said.

I know jobs are hard to come by and these sanitation officers are probably decent enough folks around their friends and family. But honestly, if I had to fine someone $2,000 for picking garbage and then impound the car belonging to whoever was nice enough to lend it to the first victim, and then fine the second victim $2,000, I would not be able to look myself in the mirror.

All New Yorkers with any sense of decency should make it as hard as possible for these government parasites to function. Next time, instead of taking your used stuff to the curb to be recycled, save yourself the labor and post it on the “free” section of craigslist or on freecycle.com. Someone will gratefully come to your home and take it away for you.

UPDATE: A judge has thrown out the fines.

Making the First Amendment Real

The Serf City Blog resides on WordPress and WordPress announced today that they are honoring the First Amendment with a new tag designed to link posts such as this one that are relevant to freedom of speech.  Of course blogs are one of the most relevant contributions of the new media to spreading the truth as any of us decide to see it, or nonsense and lies.  The big difference is that the establishment  has always had control of the mainstream media to spread their nonsense and lies  ( think New York Times and government schools). Now we have new channels that give us unfiltered information that we can process as we see fit. It’s up to us to evaluate that information and that’s just fine with me.

If we do evaluate that information we inevitably reach the conclusion that government is quite deliberately sucking the lifeblood from us. They don’t really care about destroying our futures and they don’t really care what we think about it.  Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (my district) is a perfect example.  Based on her role in causing the economic meltdown she either knows nothing about economics or she knows economics and doesn’t care that her programs designed to buy the votes of her ultra-democrat constituency are destroying the country.  As I’ve written before, she refuses to meet us in town halls we sponsor and she refuses to take our questions in town halls she sponsors.  She trusts that she doesn’t have to because she and her partners in crime have rigged the system. Between gerrymandering, campaign finance laws, ballot access laws and the lap-dog press she is pretty comfortable that she can’t really be effectively challenged.

It’s not just Maloney, it’s all them. 

But this year appears to be different.  Incumbents are having a much harder time.  But in New York and in particular New York City the incumbents are deeply entrenched.  You can blog all you want and you can even change a lot of minds.  But what does that matter if in the voting booth your only choice is between the same Democrat and Republican statists who created the problems in the first place.  In NY there are  a few thrid parties on the ballot sometimes such as the Working Families and the Conservatives and that’s good.  But for the most part they are just more extreme factions of the other two.

Where is a choice that is truly different?  Any real expression of free speech requires a choice of candidates that are different.  In New York City we learned that parties with new and different ideas can win when we elected Dan Halloran to City Council. Halloran is a Republican who also ran on Conservative, Libertarian and Independence lines.  His third party votes made the difference in his victory.  Even if third-party candidates don’t win big vote counts will pull the major parties in our direction.

We CAN be heard – but first we need to be on the ballot.

Within this system the most important way your voice is heard is through ballot access petitions. It’s even more important than your vote because if your candidates aren’t on the ballot your vote is worthless. Many non incumbant candidates are required to submit a certain number of valid signatures but alternatives parties like the Libertarians are required to submit sometimes three of four times as many, for example 15,000 for Governor. Worse the major parties have their creepy lawyers waiting to challenge your signature, usually for minor  technicalities, thereby stripping you of your voice.

You can sit back and let the establishment bind and gag you. Most people do.

Or you can fight back.

Starting Tuesday July 6 you can sign a ballot access petition to put your choice of candidates on the ballot.

You can amplify your voice by gathering signatures.

And you can call your legislators and every media outlet you can think of and tell them that if your signature is challenged you want a complete investigation of why you are being disenfranchised and you want the judges removed and the lawyers disbarred.

You can sit back while the powers that be become  more and more corrupt  and less and responsive.  Or you can make your voice heard.  It’s up to you.

Make your voice heard now: Join our ballot access effort here.

www.libertarian.meetup.com/324

Speech Defect

President Obama delivered remarks on the affordable care act and new patient’s bill of rights at the White House Tuesday.  Among her many talents, The Free Agent is a polyglot, and offers a translation of those remarks from Politish into plain English:

Stories like Amy’s and Taylor’s are exactly why we passed the Affordable Care Act.

These sob stories are a gold mine!  As long as I can hug cripples and orphans in public, I can keep the crisis going forever.

I want to thank all the members of Congress who are here today who helped to make reform a reality.

(No precise translation, a native speaker would just rub his hands together, cackling greedily.)

I just finished a meeting with the CEOs of some of America’s largest insurance companies and some of our state insurance commissioners where we discussed how we’re going to work together to implement health insurance reform.

Nobody involved in insurance is photogenic at all!  At least those fat cats have seen which way the wind is blowing and are going to play ball.  After all, they won’t actually have to offer products to the public that make a profit for the company any more.  That sounds hard.

This law will cut costs and make coverage more affordable for families and small businesses.

This law will raise costs dramatically, necessitating subsidies.  And screw you, single people and big businesses!

Last month, 4 million small business owners found a postcard in their mailbox informing them that they could be eligible for a health care tax cut this year worth tens of thousands of dollars to help them cover their employees.

Ibid

Two weeks ago, tens of thousands of seniors who fall into the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap known as the doughnut hole began receiving a $250 check to help them afford their medicine.

Old people vote.

As I said when I met with the insurance executives, it’s not meant to punish insurance companies.  They provide a critical service.  They employ large numbers of Americans.

Jobs, B, that’s the buzzword these days, shoehorn jobs in somewhere.

But insurance companies should see this reform as an opportunity to improve care and increase competition.

Because businesses like competition, right?  That’s a good word for the free-marketers, right? I want to be inclusive on this.

They shouldn’t see it as an opportunity to enact unjustifiable rate increases that don’t boost care and inflate their bottom line.

The Bureau of Small Families Business Old People Accountability and Stem Cells will now approve all rate changes.

And I’ve got some folks on the other side of the aisle that still think none of this should happen and, in fact, have said they’re going to run on a platform of repeal.  They want to go back to the system we had before.  Would you?  (Laughter)

They’re on to us, boys! Marginalize and trivialize!

Would you want to go back to discriminating against children with preexisting conditions?  Would you want to go back to dropping coverage for people when they get sick?  Would you want to reinstate lifetime limits on benefits so that mothers like Amy have to worry?

Everything I do is out of love.  Why can’t the bad people understand?

(A fly flies in front of the President.)  Get out of here.  (Laughter.)  You’ve seen me grab one of those before.  (Laughter.)

I heard the new “Karate Kid”’s doing boffo BO…

So anybody who favors repeal is welcome to come talk to these people and tell them why we should go back to the status quo prior to us signing this bill, go back to the way things were.  They are going to need to explain why they — and tens of millions of Americans — should have their new rights taken away.  I don’t think they’ll have that conversation.

Thank goodness there was this big pile of health care lying around for me to pass out.  I wonder where it grows?

Thank you very much.  God bless you.  God bless the United States of America.  (Applause.)

Dear Lord, in thy mercy, just give me eight years to get out of this before the house of cards and new rights collapses.  Amen.

Crisis du Tomorrow-jour

In the ever-changing Preakness of crises facing the nation, the looming pension crisis has moved up a few lengths for the Free Agent, thanks to Roger Lowenstein’s excellent While America Aged.  Subtitled How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis, the book lucidly describes the incentives and symbiotic relationships among government, unions, and, always, some third party who will be stuck with the bill, which almost guarantee bankruptcy.

President Obama’s take on GM and Chrysler’s insolvencies blames the companies’ creditors and The Evil Foreigner, and proposes as solutions, making the US taxpayer GM’s biggest creditor and merging Chrysler with red-white-and-blue automaker Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Fiat).  Nowhere does he mention the future pension and health care obligations which could only be shed through a bankruptcy process, although by 2005, the company, market valued at $15 billion, had future obligations to its retirees of $195 billion.

Like GM, our own Metropolitan Transit Authority threw pension benefits at the problem of potentially crippling strikes by its union.  Lowenstein defends the Transportation Workers Union’s pension demands on such bases as the workers’ suffering because of low ridership during the Depression and the brutality of the line’s supervisors.  The Free Agent sees no more sense in retaining those supervisors than she does in paying the pension required to get workers to suffer the thirty years or so under their tyranny.

In San Diego, the union was a co-conspirator in the city’s criminal underfunding of its pension obligations.  Citizens enthusiastically re-elected low-tax candidates, but the house of cards stood until the turns in the stock and housing markets.  A city short of cash (but like any gambler, sure its fortunes were just about to turn) bargained away contributions to its employee pensions in return for several increases in its ultimate long-term obligations.  (None richer than the city officials themselves, one veteran of a grueling six-year stint as city manager retired with a lifetime pension of $55,000 a year.)

Lowenstein’s prescriptions for what ails the ageing American worker will be sadly familiar to Libertarians.  He argues that defined benefit pensions, which did in a phenomenally profitable company, would work if only writ large: to the whole United States.  The fact that the much more modest Social Security retirement benefit threatens to overwhelm the current budget doesn’t diminish his belief that bureaucrats and politicians could somehow responsibly handle far greater sums.  (He does make the sensible argument that pension obligations should be fully funded, and . . . good luck with that.)  The Free Agent, as part of her basic service, offers alternative lessons from the pension debacle:

• There is no entitlement to a twenty-five year paid vacation.
• The United Auto Workers did not do its membership a favor by letting their compensation rise so far above what other auto workers (and similarly skilled non-union workers) make.  Detroit has been called a dying city for the past thirty-five years, one reason being that union rules require 90% wages be paid for the first year of a lay-off, so workers are discouraged from moving or changing careers.  Ultimately, labor costs made it impossible for GM to compete on price with Toyota and Honda.  (Lowenstein credits Japan’s national health insurance, ignoring the fact that Toyota pays through its taxes, rather than directly, but still pays.)
• Politicians always have an incentive to grant benefits, tax breaks, Cash for Klunkers, etc., today and let someone else pay the bills down the road.  Corporations do as well, but publicly traded corporations are subject to audits and stock market adjustments to their valuations.  Lots of people watch corporations, but the Fourth Estate has been woefully remiss in exposing the actual state of public service.  Now that journalists are decrying the decline in their readership, the FA suggests this is a window of opportunity, and that we can get our plastic surgery horror stories elsewhere.
• You can’t keep promises you can’t keep.  (Only the federal government can pay its bills by printing money, another reason for it to have no involvement in pensions.  If only because it punishes, with the cruelty of inflation, those who take responsibility for saving for their own retirements.)  GM’s spinoff parts supplier, Delphi, paid off retirees with a tiny fraction of the benefits they’d been promised when it went bankrupt.  How city and state pension balloons will be dealt with remains to be seen, by law—yes, another case of the government exempting itself from laws it imposes on us—their pension obligations cannot be reduced.
• Half a dozen times, including in his recommendations, Lowenstein asserts that governments and heavy industry “rely on” a stable workforce and that pensions pay people to stick around.  While the latter is true, the Free Agent suggests that it would cause no harm to subway operation, auto assembly, trash collection, law enforcement, public education, and all the rest, to join the productive part of the economy in evolving a flexible workforce.  One that would not have the power to extort compensation beyond what other workers get by threatening to strike.