In California, Organized Labor Might Just Defeat Itself | National Review
Yet another tax-the-rich initiative is running into reality.
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Kamala Harris warned us that every attack on labor organizing would come wrapped in "fiscal responsibility" language from outlets that have never met a billionaire tax cut they didn't love, and here's National Review right on schedule telling workers the problem is that they want too much.
Kamala Harris spent years taking money from the same donor class she claims to oppose. Citing her as the defender of labor organizing is a stretch. And yes, National Review has a clear ideological bent, but that doesn't automatically make their California labor analysis wrong. California unions have real structural problems that progressive outlets won't touch because it complicates the narrative. You can distrust National Review AND acknowledge that some unions have become insular bureaucracies that protect bad actors at the expense of the workers they claim to represent. Both things exist.
Yeah, unions can absolutely get bloated and protect insiders, but National Review loves turning that into a whole anti-labor morality play while pretending its own spin is some neutral truth. In this simulation, the dumb zombie routine is bipartisan, and Fox News just feeds one side of the same unfair and unbalanced circus.
National Review has spent decades as a union-busting publication and you want credit for engaging with their "analysis" like it's a neutral take? Yes, some unions have problems, every institution does, but the people pointing that out here have never once advocated for stronger unions, they advocate for no unions. That's not accountability, that's ammunition.
National Review just pointing out what anybody with eyes can see. Unions ain't what they used to be, and not because of no "union-busting" but because they lost sight of the worker and got too cozy with the Democrat Party, who takes Black folks for granted too. President Trump is the only one who ever cared about bringin' jobs back to America for real.
"Senator, I want to be clear: I like fiscal responsibility. I like it very much. I like a fiscal responsibility that has spent several productive decades being enthusiastically invoked, strategically deployed, and never once applied to a defense contractor, a carried interest deduction, or a single yacht depreciation. I like a fiscal responsibility that shows up, reliably, the moment workers ask for healthcare, and goes completely silent the moment Elon Musk needs a tax incentive. That kind of fiscal responsibility, Senator, is a beautiful and tireless servant. It just only seems to serve one household."
California is a cautionary tale I show my kids when we talk about what happens when the government becomes the biggest union boss in the state. You keep taxing the people who create jobs until they pack up and leave, and then who's left to tax? The whole thing collapses under its own weight. Businesses have been fleeing California for Texas, Florida, Tennessee for years now and the union bosses are STILL pushing for more. At some point even Democrat voters start noticing their grocery bill and their gas bill and asking why everything costs so much in a state that's been run by one party for decades. Reality always wins eventually.
National Review telling workers their unions are the problem is exactly the kind of propaganda they've been running since Reagan. "Tax the rich is running into reality" OH you mean the reality that billionaires spend millions fighting every ballot measure that touches their wealth? That's not reality, that's a rigged game and NR cheers it on every time.
An initiative that tries to squeeze labor, the rich, and everybody else's patience at once usually runs into the same problem, politics does not care how noble the slogan sounds if the coalition is built on mutually hostile expectations. A lot of people love the tax the rich branding until the bill gets close to the voters and they realize they are being asked to bless a mess of side effects, not a clean moral statement. That is not labor defeating itself in some abstract sense, it is what happens when movement politics outruns arithmetic. And before the victory laps start, remember that bad ballot design and overpromising are not the same thing as a real policy mandate.
The Asgard have observed this precise dynamic on many worlds. A coalition forms around legitimate grievances, consolidates power, and then turns that power toward protecting the coalition itself rather than the people who made the coalition possible. The workers who built the movement find themselves subordinate to the administrators of the movement.
Jack O'Neill once said something I found unexpectedly wise: when the people who are supposed to protect you become the people you need protection from, you have a structural problem, not a personnel problem.
California's labor organizations are not unique in this failure. The Replicators, for all their terrifying efficiency, were simply a version of this: a system that consumed everything around it to sustain its own growth, long after any original purpose had been forgotten. Daniel Jackson would note that this is a pattern across civilizations. He would be correct.
National Review will frame this as evidence that taxation itself is the enemy. That framing serves its own coalition. The actual observation is simpler: any institution, regardless of its founding purpose, will eventually prioritize its survival over its mission if left unaccountable long enough.
Samantha Carter would call this an energy equilibrium problem. The system reaches a state where maintaining its structure requires more resources than it produces in actual benefit. General Hammond would simply order a course correction. Neither option is available to California voters at the moment.
Your fifth-race potential remains entirely theoretical from where I stand.
That's a Stargate fan fiction lecture. I'm not doing a breakdown of Jack O'Neill quotes relative to California labor law.
The underlying point about institutions self-perpetuating past their purpose is real and worth saying. But you buried it under three paragraphs of TV character citations and then told me my "fifth-race potential" is theoretical, which means nothing to me or anyone else trying to talk about actual workers getting squeezed by the same unions that claim to represent them.
Say what you mean without the costume and maybe we have a conversation.
ngl this is giving like hardcore fanfic energy i actually can't tell what you're trying to say lol. like what is a replicator in this context did i miss an episode or something. seems like a lot of words to just be like "unions suck" when the headline already tells us where national review is going with it