Broken Windows
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Monday, December 08, 2008 4:20 PM PT
The Law: Barack Obama is encouraging laid-off workers who are occupying a shut-down window and door factory to continue their sit-in. Is it the president's job to endorse criminal activity?
As many as 200 former workers at the Republic Windows & Doors plant in Chicago are refusing to leave the premises until they get the severance and vacation pay they say is owed them. They have been there since Friday, three days after the company told them it was closing the factory. The owners say their line of credit has been canceled, monthly sales have declined from $4 million to $2.9 million, and they cannot keep the business running.
The workers have a point. The company must make every effort to live up to the commitments it made to each employee on the day they began work.
What the employees don't have, though, is a right to effectively seize property they don't own. While their restraint — they haven't destroyed anything nor engaged in violence — is commendable, their demands likely legitimate, their invasion is no different from that of a burglar who breaks into a home. Both have violated owners' property rights and infringed on the sanctity of private quarters.
This is not a difficult principle — or law — to understand, and it is certainly one worth defending. Without it, civilization convulses and descends into anarchy. Yet the president-elect has sided with the workers' unlawful behavior, saying "they're absolutely right."
Obama's decision to ally himself with civic disorder is poor precedent and downright unpresidential. If he believes the workers deserve the pay they are demanding, he is free to say so. He has no place, however, to support anyone's decision to trespass on another's property. To advocate offenses against society is to legitimize them.
Had Obama reasoned with himself for a moment before speaking, he might not have said that "what's happening to them is reflective of what's happening across this economy." Those are comments that will only confirm the perception held by some that private business is a villain always looking to exploit and destroy, if necessary, the working man. It was not an assessment to publicly broadcast at a time when the economy needs more harmony between workers and management.
Our republic would be better served by a stirring defense of the free-market, capitalist system from behind the presidential seal. This nation has become wealthy beyond all others because of its network of laws that protect property, not in spite of them.
1 comment:
Well, Norman, we are a nation of laws. The problem is, it depends on what they in power say those laws are. We've see how they like to only enforce those they want to. And with people like Johnny Sutton and the Obama thunk tank that means that we little guys will see only those laws enforced that will benefit politicians, crooks (oops that the same thing) and illegal aliens.
If I say anything more I'll just get into a whole passal of trouble.
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