CEA’s Gary Shapiro Assails Govt. Regulations, Certain Union Activities

Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), has a few choice words about unions, government bailouts and free trade, and he spills them out in a commentary in yesterday's Washington Times.

During a recent trip to an impoverished India, Shapiro was reminded of just how good we have it in the U.S., with our reliable electricity, plumbing and medical care, and our wealth of creativity and enterprise.

"Yet, we are quickly putting our American way of life at risk," Shapiro writes:

In the last few months our government has spent nearly a trillion dollars we don't have to bolster a few companies considered too important to fail. We are on the verge of spending billions more to temporarily bail out three American car companies, while doing nothing to resolve their core problem -- bloated autoworker union contracts.

Shapiro rightly assails the pending "card check" legislation that would deny union members a secret ballot, and he accuses Democrats of kowtowing to the union leaders who put half a billion dollars into election coffers this season.

Gary Shapiro has some serious chutzpah.

It isn't politically correct to challenge anything vaguely related to unions or workers -- even when we know intellectually that U.S. workers ultimately suffer from purported "labor-friendly" actions, such as taxing imported goods.

My new year's resolution was to avoid controversy and try not to tick people off but I think I'm off to a bad start.

I applaud Gary's guts in sticking up for free enterprise, at a time when the popular sentiment is to "protect" ourselves through handouts, taxes, regulations and isolationism.

Gary sums it up nicely:

We have lost our way. A misplaced sense of entitlement is creating hardships that may push our innovation economy overseas. Our mounting debt is fueling our last grasp on primacy. Our laws are discouraging innovation and investment. And soon our crumbling infrastructure and faltering economy will hasten our fall from the top.