“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” the late Steve Jobs told President Obama. In the biography Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes, “[Jobs said] To prevent that . . . the administration needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs.”
Kimberley Strassel of The Wall Street Journal writes, “Voter backlash to the president’s liberal policies gave Republicans the House in 2010, but the more immediate effects were in the states. Of the 29 current Republican governors, 21 have taken office since 2010. Midterm voters also gave the GOP unified control of 26 state legislatures, providing their newly elected leaders the firepower to pursue their reform agendas.”
Since President Obama took office, Indiana has become the 23rd right-to-work state and doesn’t appear ready to vote for him a second time. Indiana is an island oasis for business, surrounded on all sides by forced-union states. It’s hard to believe that in this country there are 27 states where you can be forced to join a union as a condition of your employment.
But what’s deceiving about the right-to-work states is that collective bargaining in the public sector is allowed in 16 of them. That means collective bargaining in the public sector is allowed in 43 states. It’s no wonder that 37% of public-sector union employees belong to a union, compared to only 7% in the private sector.
That leaves only seven states that are right-to-work and that have laws on the books preventing collective bargaining in the public sector: Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Surprisingly, two of these freedom-loving states—North Carolina and Virginia—voted for Obama in 2008.
I’m sure the jobless in Charlotte, North Carolina, are aware of the success BMW is having just an hour and a half south on I-85 in open-for-business South Carolina. Let’s not forget Obama’s National Labor Relations Board attack on Boeing in South Carolina, which I’m sure rubbed a lot of workers the wrong way in neighboring North Carolina. The unemployment rate in North Carolina has remained above the national average during the Obama tenure. Those looking for work should be the ones protesting at the Democratic convention this week.
Business owners in Virginia won’t forget President Obama’s “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” speech in Roanoke. As our friend, a business owner in Virginia, said in an email to Richard C. Young, “Dick, what a shame. Here we are in the land of Thomas Jefferson and this guy can get the slack-jawed fools to cheer at his every word. It’s good to know that the government was there to help me when we were starting the company. I left Connecticut in no small part because of the barriers they set up in the form of high taxes and pro-union politics. If this guy gets back in office, we are [%^$&$#].”
