“I recollect, when I was lamenting to the Doctor [Adam Smith] the misfortunes of the American war, and exclaimed, “If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined; he answered, ‘Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.’”
–Sir John Sinclair, recalling a conversation with Adam Smith
***
Big Labor, not content merely to raise taxes to fund itself (with the occasional “extra steps”), is pushing an expropriation of private property in California to fund health care for illegal immigrants. This is absolutely, positively real, and it risks wrecking the economic future of Big Labor’s long-standing Golden State.
On the Golden State
California should be the greatest state in the Union. Its climate may not be matched anywhere in the world. Its natural beauty helped inspire the great wave of conservation at the turn of the 20th century. Its industrial might built the war machine that defeated first the Nazis and Imperial Japanese and later the Soviet Communists. Its culture defined the American Dream of the post-World War II era. And its high technology industry has made America’s computing sector the envy of the world.
But its Achilles’ Heel has long been its government, infused for over a century with a strong progressive tendency and Progressive Era structures, especially its system of government-by-ballot-initiative. That system was once an idealistic bet on the wisdom of the public, self-government, and direct democracy. But in recent decades the California ballot has become a battlefield for well-funded special interest groups to fight each other. (Perhaps nothing illustrates this more vividly than 2024’s Proposition 33 and Proposition 34, dueling measures pushed by and targeting the radical-left housing group AIDS Healthcare Foundation respectively.)
There is always a labor angle
Enter stage far-left the Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers-West, or SEIU UHW-West for short. The union has historically been one of the most powerful in Big Labor’s Golden State, and it has frankly abused the ballot initiative system to advance its organizing goals. As I wrote before:
SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West has used the California statewide ballot to repeatedly wage battle with dialysis clinics the union hopes to organize. The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat editorial board called the 2018 version of the ballot battle “an abuse of the initiative system” in its editorial calling on voters to reject the SEIU’s measure. Between spending on the 2018 measure and a 2020 successor measure, both of which failed by wide margins, the SEIU has staked $25 million against the clinics’ over $200 million in the battle of attrition. While SEIU-UHW leader Dave Regan has denied that the series of initiatives is a unionization tactic, a representative of the left-leaning organization Consumer Watchdog told Politico, “He [Regan] doesn’t need to win to win . . . and that’s the abuse of the initiative process.”
To the extent it uses the initiative process as a pain point to support its organizing, SEIU-UHW is merely operating in standard procedure for unions exploiting California legislation and constitutional structure.
But harassing dialysis clinics is not enough for SEIU UHW-West. Fearing a shortfall in California’s Medicaid program (which, incidentally, gives state-subsidized health coverage to illegal immigrants to illegal immigrant children, young adults, and the elderly) from declining federal subsidies, the union has proposed a massive asset seizure unprecedented in American history. The technology-industry-focused media outlet Pirate Wires describes the proposal:
The ballot prop would impose a “one-time” 5% asset seizure on residents with a net worth over $1 billion, including everything from cash, property, and the watch on your wrist to, most insanely, illiquid and unrealized equity. Ostensibly, this is being done so poor Californians can finally have healthcare, but actually, as I uncovered in November, it’s largely not about Californians at all. Due to cuts to federal Medicaid spending, California is anticipating upwards of a $100 billion budget shortfall, maybe more, in the state’s healthcare system over the next five years. Thus, the talking point from the union behind the asset seizure is roughly: we have to levy this “one-time, emergency tax on around 200 to 300 people” to keep emergency rooms from going bankrupt. What the heroic, emergency room-saving union leaves out is California’s state-funded healthcare programs are, uh, generous: new state legislation, for instance, guaranteed taxpayer-funded healthcare for all illegal immigrants at a cost of something like $12.5 billion last year.
Pirate Wires discussed the proposal with almost two dozen of the figures who might be affected, and most said they would leave the state if the SEIU got its way. While it would not protect them from the retroactivity clause in the ballot measure, it would protect them from the almost-certain return to the well the union (and the state’s hegemonic left-wing political movement) would undertake when the first raid on private property proved insufficient to pay for medicine for California’s illegal population forever. They also expressed sentiments that because the ballot measure defines expropriate-able property in a way that makes privately held firms or special classes of public stock essentially impossible to hold, the technology industry that has kept California’s economy afloat since the 1990s will have to undertake a mass exodus.
Lessons for the class
In short, SEIU UHW-West is risking killing Big Labor’s Golden State (or at least its economic driver, the high-tech industry of Silicon Valley) in order to prop up health care for illegal immigrants. This feat of leftism intersects with two of the major issues that I expend so much effort trying to raise, so I will now raise them.
First, Big Labor is Everything Leftism (and always has been). While I usually discuss Everything Leftism in terms of non-economic issues, it is also an economically leftist movement, and nothing is more economically leftist than class warfare to seize the means of production for the state. (If you can get to the Kremlin wall these days, just ask the ashes of socialist American labor unionist Big Bill Haywood, who was interred there by Joe Stalin’s government.) But when some claim that organized labor has a “conservative heart,” it is important to illustrate just how comprehensively wrong that is.
Second, it is important to remember just how committed Big Labor is to de facto open borders. SEIU UHW-West is all but staking the future of its state—which has been so friendly to the union movement that rides along on its climate, its innovation, its population size, its agricultural productivity and so forth—to get free health care for illegal immigrants.
Sure, the union, which represents hospital staff, has a pecuniary interest in the hospitals it organizes having more business. But this effort—a first in the nation property seizure that may cause Silicon Valley’s firms to exit the state for more business-friendly (and right-to-work) climates in Texas, Florida, and the like—is much more than Samuel Gompers’s “more wages” for workers. It is a declaration that SEIU UHW-West will risk everything—potentially the entire state’s economic future—on welfare for illegal immigrants. And that should tell anyone more about where Big Labor is ideologically and where it would take America if let off its leash.
