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Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

Another piece (brought up in the comments) that warrants investigation is the role of privatization of prisons. With that, you have private organizations lobbying the government to increase their bottom lines, and politicians get to look tough on crime as a nice bonus.

The part that scares me the most is that is may be impossible to live in the US without breaking some law. When everybody is a criminal, the state gets too much power.

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It's easy to blame privitization, but large public sector unions can be just as influential. As a politican I'd be much more afraid of angering, say, the AFT than I would be of any single private company.

Just because someone you don't like is clamoring for more money doesn't mean no one was clamoring for money before.

You think the teachers' union is more powerful than any single company? that is a joke. If teachers had the power of the top dogs in the finance, pharma, defense or energy industries (to take a few obvious examples) have they'd all make 7 figures.

Nobody is talking about teachers. But in California the Prison Guard Union holds immense sway.

There was a superb NPR investigative piece on that maybe a year ago. I remember being shocked at the guards' union's role in creating the problem. And to think that California prisons just a generation ago were so good -- recidivism so low -- that other countries were sending delegations to find out how they did it.

> You think the teachers' union is more powerful than any single company? that is a joke. If teachers had the power of the top dogs in the finance, pharma, defense or energy industries (to take a few obvious examples) have they'd all make 7 figures.

Half of CA's budget goes to education, by constitutional amendment.

What industry approaches that?

For some reason it's recently become trendy to paint teachers' unions as the root of all evil on Hacker News. Who knows which think tank master-minded this particular tidbit of right-wing propaganda, but it's a story line that rings increasingly hollow the more I see it haphazardly inserted into every imaginable public policy debate.

I guess the rating of your comment reflects the result of pointing this out.

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