At Least One in Hollywood Doesn't Understand the Difference Between Private and Public Money

Meet Wally Pfister, who won an Oscar for cinematography:

At the Academy Awards tonight, best cinematography winner Wally Pfister made a point during his acceptance speech of thanking his union crew on “Inception.”

Backstage he went further, expressing shock at Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal, which would limit union’s collective bargaining powers. Opponents of the plan have been protesting at the state capitol for 21 days.

“I think that what is going on in Wisconsin is kind of madness right now,” Pfister says. “I have been a union member for 30 years and what the union has given to me is security for my family. They have given me health care in a country that doesn’t provide health care and I think unions are a very important part of the middle class in America all we are trying to do is get a decent wage and have medical care.”

This is a classic example of a guy who's good at his craft, but isn't so good at understanding what's really going on in the news. SAG and AFTRA are entertainment unions that are funded with PRIVATE money, the money made by the entertainment industry thanks to the products they produce. In Wisconsin, the only unions affected by Gov. Scott Walker's bill are public employees who are funded by tax dollars. There is a big difference.

Public employees should never have been allowed to unionize. Even FDR, the hero of all things liberal, was very much opposed to public unions. Daniel DiSalvo explains:

Even President Franklin Roosevelt, a friend of private-sector unionism, drew a line when it came to government workers: “Meticulous attention,” the president insisted in 1937, “should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government….The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” The reason? F.D.R. believed that “[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.”

Read your history, Hollywood. Go ahead and have all the private unions you want, but public employees should not exist.