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" CHICAGO \u2014 Much of the discussion at a distance about the current teachers strike here centers around the argument that the teachers are in a weaker position because of the political peril inherent in riling up &amp;quot;the taxpayers.&amp;quot; It is argued that the strike is a bad idea on its merits because there is in it a fundamentally insurmountable political flaw. Leaving aside the simple facts that strikes are supposed to inconvenience people \u2014 that&amp;#039;s rather the whole point of them \u2014 the only possible answer to this question is, &amp;quot;So what?&amp;quot; Individual taxpayers are worthy of respect. But &amp;quot;taxpayers,&amp;quot; of course, in their iconic collective identity as expressed in our politics over the past 30 years or so, is a dumb rampaging beast. By and large, &amp;quot;taxpayers&amp;quot; as a political force are behind not only the various measures that have made California largely ungovernable, but also they are the great impetus behind the lunatic &amp;quot;pledge&amp;quot; extracted from Republican congresscritters by Grover Norquist that has enforced paralysis on the national legislature. As an iconic collective political entity, they fall over and over again for privatization scams and then howl when the streetlights go out or the garbage gets picked up, or some executive in a for-profit prison winds up bribing a judge to send him more inmates. Or, conversely, they want high-quality public education that doesn&amp;#039;t cost what they perceive to be too much, as well as the right to vilify the people who provide it, whatever their salaries may be. This is the collective statement of the principle expressed often by people stopped for DUI who lecture the cop on &amp;quot;who it is that pays your salary.&amp;quot; It is that attitude writ large.  As a collective political entity, &amp;quot;taxpayers&amp;quot; are moved too easily to anger and overreaction, and, in that anger and overreaction, they are too easily sold the magic beans by which the public good disappears, transmuted into a private profit centers from which more and more of the individual taxpayers find themselves excluded, much to their collective mystification. It is an undeniable fact of history that the people who have profited most from the &amp;quot;taxpayer revolts&amp;quot; of the past 40 years \u2014 from Howard Jarvis to the Tea Party \u2014 are the people who have profited most from the upward transfer of wealth during that same period. Odd how that worked out, isn&amp;#039;t it? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a15782/chicago-strike-taxpayers-12669139/>