Under a normal bankruptcy, under specific rules, those who put the money in would have been first in line to get the money out. Under Obama-style make-the-rules-as-you-go bankruptcy, a lot of investors got the shaft, and the unions (and government) got most of the pie.

Any idiot in government can create a period of "stability and prosperity" if they don't give a rip what happens ten or twenty years down the road. In fact, the entire corpus of government economic thinking operates this way.

If the union negotiators thought the 1960s would last forever, and that the only thing Japan would ever build is transistor radios, that's too bad, but they've had plenty of time to correct that misperception. We are long past the time when new employees should have been getting the same deal a 1965 hire-on got.

The "majority of the nation" doesn't have cushy pensions, lifetime benefits, or any of the other goodies that the unions have gotten over the years. A while back, when the local dockworkers union was an issue, we took a look at the pay and benefits. Believe me, a "majority of the nation" should have it that good.

You don't know beans about what I've gone through to make a living at times. Only one of the jobs I've held in the past thirty years had any kind of a safety net at all, and a self-employed person doesn't even get unemployment benefits when the contracts run out. The last check I got for the HMX work was last November.