#rsrh Thus do I refute Megan McArdle.

Who I like, remember.  But when she writes something like this:

We should be looking for ways to make teaching more open to part-timers and people in second, third, or eighth career cycles, and to make it easier for teachers to move around between schools and districts, and between teaching and other industries.

It’s just too damned easy to respond with this:

Well, that’ll happen over the union’s dead body.

…and the conversation ends there.  Look, it’s not my fault that public sector unions exist; that they have metastasized throughout federal, state, and local governments; that they are now adjuncts of the Democratic party*; and that we can no longer afford to give them more and more free stuff every year while private sector wages and benefits stagnate, if not retreat.  It’s also not my fault that the well of my sympathy is dry.  And it is certainly not my fault that public sector unions have dug in their heels and refused to admit that you can’t be simultaneously a noble collection of independent secular saints and avowed political partisans.

But all of these things are true, and they are now affecting the political environment, and by ‘affecting’ I mean ‘destroying.’  We can talk about how to maintain the system after we’re done making the most critical repairs to it.  And that involves breaking the Democratic party’s control over government infrastructures.  We have to, if for no other reason that they completely suck at running them.

(H/T: Instapundit)

Moe Lane

PS: I know that Megan addresses this somewhat, a bit later in her post.  But she’s making the mistake, I think, of assuming that there is any way to reform the system that does not involve taking away the unions’ ability to muck it up.  That means breaking the unnatural link between the Democratic party and public sector unions.  It simply does.  There is no reasoning with the Other Side on this: when you try, they either run away, or they have their goons throw fists in your face.  And then they tell you that you deserve such treatment because you’re one of the Bad People and they’re being nice by talking to you at all, you dirty racist homophobe [insert filthy name here].

No more.  They had their chance.

*Translation: “fair game.”