Public employees

Ned has a confession to make and unlike those of St Augustine or J-J Rousseau, his confession will be brief and to the point.
For months now, his resentment--yes, call it resentment--against the employees in his local school district has been festering and fermenting like some diabolical pot of kimchee. He has read of their "outrageous" pension deals, benefits and salaries. Their work schedule he had already determined to be, well, perhaps 'liberal' would be the most nonjudgmental term. His taxes crept ever higher while the assessed valuation on his Version of the American Dream resolutely declined. Anger, which forces out logic and reason, began to prevail in his most benevolent, logical and reasonable of minds.
His resentment had been stirred by a focus on the retirement ages for "safety" workers in California, which can be 95% of their last year's salary--FOR LIFE, and if it could be determined that they were in some way "disabled", much of their pension was tax-free. Let it be known that "safety" workers does not include just the usual suspects--police, fire and what-have-you, but it also can include milk inspectors in California. Add to this, the fact that public employees in many school districts have their health care entirely paid for, as well as most if not all of their pension contribution, and you have an explosion of resentment ready to happen.
But then, as if from a dream, Ned woke up, wiped the orc-dust from his eyes and realized that he had been the victim of a nefarious plot. Ned has been drinking the Sneering Plutocrat-financed "Tea Party" foolery concerning public employees. Why shouldn't ALL workers in this "greatest country in the world" enjoy universal health care? Why shouldn't ALL workers enjoy decent vacations and working conditions and a pension that allows them to live in reasonable comfort after a life of contributory work? Why should this sort of life be limited to sneering plutocrats who got their jobs by a life of backstabbing, or through connections through the "old boy" network, or through some quota system that calls for some percentage of upper management to consist of persons of alternative lifestyles, genders or differing racial persuasions?
When Ned thinks of the rewards showered on these sneering elitists through the legal thievery of the "corporate, capitalist" system, when Boards of Directors, selected by the same sneering CEO that benefits from their "competitive" salary decisions, award salaries in the tens of millions of dollars while piling even more onerous work on the employees still left after the latest round of 'rightsizing', when he realizes that these same conspirators have engendered through their political bribes and payoffs tax rates that should make any Christian soul blush with shame and mortification,he feels a sense of white-hot anger and shame that makes any token resentment he may have felt towards some miserable functionary making 60 grand a year seem as a squashed flea egg on the back of a snarling dog.
When the sneering plutocracy has their greedy grasping blood-dripping, outsourcing paws slapped away from the obscene piles of lucre that were formerly theirs for any mediocre achievement, then Ned will agree to rein in the modest functionaries of his local or state government. Until then, Ned only wishes the plutocracy would have the rewards that he would gladly give them.