For me, and this has always been the case, there is a limit to how much of the thin blue line I’m willing to pay for. We need police in our society; we can’t function without them. We should not defund the police as Democrats have suggested. But when you are dealing with public sector unions that always want to expand government, “defund” is not an open checkbook that is beyond the reach of management. Throwing infinite amounts of money at police or any government employee is a bad idea. Society should pay for the police and to pay for them well. But not infinitely.
Traditionally, when police or fire employees insist that they always receive more money, they say, but we run into fires, we run into gunfire, so you don’t have to. I will volunteer to run into a burning building to save a dog any day of the week. I will gladly engage with a dangerous group of shooters any day of the week, any hour of the day. And I’d do it without pay because I would look at something like that as fun. So I’m not a big fan of that argument. Yes, police work is dangerous. But those who get into it understand that. It’s a privilege to wear the badge. The community should support the police enthusiastically. We should all live by the laws of our society, constitutionally supported. But the arguments of pay, such as what Dan Hils did on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas, is an exploitation of the standard union point of view, which is always communist in nature, to attempt to argue more pay in all the ways that the police unions expect it. There is a limit to what police are worth. When an FOP president makes the case from an obvious liberal point of view to a radio talk show host who is typically a small government kind of guy, it makes for an interesting debate that often hides in the cracks of our society.
Everyone knows I’m not a big fan of the Cincinnati Bengals. My favorite team is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and it has been since Mike Brown fired Sam Wyche as the head coach. My support of Wyche went with him to Tampa from Cincinnati, and I have never forgiven the Brown family for that firing. They are losers as NFL owners. They run a bad organization that does not represent the city well. Sure they went to the Super Bowl last year because they have really good players. But over the years, they don’t know how to close the deal, and if they win, it’s usually because they get lucky and the other teams overlook them. But I don’t like this Billionaire Bengals talk from the FOP president, Dan Hils. I also have to remind people that every labor union in America started as a communist idea. Every entertainment union, government sector union, and union that runs some manufacturing aspect are all Karl Marx’s products. With Trump he’s a former Democrat who has opened up the tent of the Republican Party to include labor unions. In politics, there are many viewpoints, and people often don’t get everything they want. So it’s worth discussing unions’ problems with the same people who now consider themselves MAGA Republicans. With that in mind, all this talk about the Bengals paying double time and triple time for traffic staff before and after games is a perfect example of how the same people who will talk about saving money with taxes on one topic find themselves nodding in agreement with Dan Hils on the extortion racket being played out with the Cincinnati Bengals and talked about on the air as if the Bengals should pay whatever it costs for safety because they have the money and can afford to. Just because someone like Dan Hils, from the perspective of a communist police union, thinks that the Bengals are rich, does that mean they should be obligated to pay some artificial value for more traffic cops at Bengal games?
I go to Bengal games a few times a year, and I prefer the great seats when I go. When I arrive, it’s usually where the player entrance is, so I get to see all the security they have at these games from that point of view, and there is a lot of police there—a lot of security. I tend to think that the Bengals should hire their own security for their own events. But as Dan Hils points out on Brian Thomas’ broadcast, the Bengals can’t pay for their security on a city street leading to and from the stadium. Those are city streets, and the police union has it rigged so that only they can provide traffic services. It’s the same kind of mess that you deal with at any union where tasks are placed in silos, and restrictions to productivity are also associated with the labor assigned to that task. For instance, you might have a box of pencils sitting on a dock meant for the office area. But the unionized dock workers are on a break, or have called off work for the day. Or maybe they are on strike. So there sits the box of pencils. The office people need them. They can look through the window into the dock and see the pencils sitting there. But they are not allowed to go in and pick them up so they can get their pencils. They have to wait for the union to perform the task. That is the kind of political game the Cincinnati FOP has going on regarding city streets leading to and from the stadium. Because the unionized police want a monopoly on the work, they complain that the work just can’t get done because they don’t have the staffing or the money. But the Bengals aren’t allowed to provide a solution. Or perhaps the people attending the games might volunteer to help direct traffic. They are prevented from helping because they are not lawfully permitted to perform that task.
Spoken like a true communist union president, Dan Hils places all the blame on the Billionaire Bengals because they are rich and can afford to pay whatever the members of the Thin Blue Line require. But the Bengals’ options are to use Dan Hils unionized employees at rates of double time or triple time to pay for the mismanagement of the police force in general at whatever cost they decide. Rather than hiring their own people at $15 per hour or less to perform a task that is only worth minimum wage for a few hours on a Sunday to keep people from running into each other. And because we are politically on a path to support the police no matter the cost, someone like Brian Thomas, who is a small government guy, gets pulled into a discussion about defending a government union’s ridiculous extortion racket. And from the perspective of Dan Hils, his argument is that the Reds pay for the security, as to other sports events in the downtown area. So why don’t the Bengals pay too? Well, because the police union is forcing a customer to pay for goods and services that they control exclusively, and they expect to pass their mismanagement off as an undisputed bill, which is ridiculous. The police are great to have, but I don’t like their labor unions. I’d volunteer to help the police if there weren’t so many dumb rules that keep people from helping them. In many ways, they create their own problems by forcing restrictions on themselves and then expect a community to pay for their mismanagement of financial resources. And at a certain point, when they ask for too much, the community should just get rid of them and form their own law enforcement that doesn’t have a union attached to it. And my argument would be that it would work far better and be a whole lot cheaper. Just because rich people can afford to pay, that’s not up to Dan Hils to decide. It’s up to market values to determine, and the FOP of Cincinnati clearly isn’t interested in that kind of discussion. They are just like everyone else; they want the most money possible for the least work produced. It’s up to management in all cases to determine the value of that ratio.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 