Welcome to Begg to Differ.

The Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum.

We range from center left to center right.

I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist, Policy Editor at the Bullwork, and I'm joined

by our regulars, Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal, and Damon Linker who writes the sub-stack newsletter Eyes on the Right.

This week, Kathy Young of the Bull Work is sitting in for Linda Chavez and our special guest is Philip K Howard

author of many books most recently not accountable,

rethinking the constitutionality of public employee unions.

So thanks one and all, we are going to get to the legal troubles of the former president and a look back at the Iraq war 20 years later.

But first I am very happy to have Philip K Howard because your book is very stimulating.

So we've discussed on this podcast many times the bailful effects of both police

unions and teacher unions on the public good.

But you go even further.

Now, please give examples if you'd like,

but you're really against all public sector unions and you doubt whether they're even constitutional.

Yeah that's correct. What's happened is that it's a recent phenomenon public

employee unions were only allowed to collectively bargain in the late 1960s and no one really

debated it or thought much about it and for the last 50 years they've basically seized control of the operating machinery of government so

there's no accountability it's really very difficult to manage any public

office there's anything unusual happens.

There's a pandemic where the contract doesn't say anything

about teaching in a pandemic.

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