Wisconsin is in turmoil. Democrat senators have fled the state. Teachers and public sector unions have illegally gone on strike. Seventy thousand protesters inundated downtown Madison. The dangerous game of chicken is intensifying as a multibillion-dollar deficit grows bigger by the day.

How the Wisconsin union standoff is resolved will have enormous implications for people in all 50 states. It is a giant wake-up call for a broke nation still trying to spend its way to prosperity.

Yet from all the nasty rhetoric and political grandstanding, it is obvious that people still haven’t got it. Scott Walker has barely scratched the surface of the state’s budget problems, but from the union outcry, you would have thought that Governor Walker was firing thousands of employees and forcing draconian wage cuts.

But what are the facts? Do unions have grounds for complaint?

The average two-income household in Wisconsin makes $52,000 per year. Single-wage-earning households average just over $40,000. Meanwhile, individual teachers in Milwaukee make, on average, $56,500 per year in salary—plus a whopping $44,000 in additional benefits like health care costs and pension contributions. That is over $100,000—and for only working for nine months of the year!

Doesn’t it seem reasonable that unionized public employees share the pain of budget cuts?

Even some union leaders seem to agree, publicly supporting Walker’s proposed salary cuts—which would result in about an 8 percent reduction in take-home pay. Going forward, employees (not counting police or firefighters) would have to contribute 5.6 percent toward their pension plans and 12.6 percent toward their health care coverage.

Yet some argue that public employees are more skilled than others and should thus be paid more. Although there may be some merit to this argument, most English, art, music and physical education teachers would probably be hard-pressed to earn a similar salary if they had to work in the private sector. Additionally, in the case of the school system, the fruits do not bear this out. Only 68 percent of students graduate from high school. Only 41 percent of tenth graders are proficient in reading and 28 percent of them proficient or advanced at math.

But instead of sharing the pain, 40 percent of Madison teachers, for example, called in sick to protest the cuts—and even brought their students to protest.

Despite all the howling, Walker’s budget cuts will only save the state at best $300 million, over the next two years, out of a projected $3.6 billion deficit. What people should really be crying fowl about is how Wisconsin got into such a mess in the first place.

Making matters worse, recent studies indicate that the state may have been lying about its pension funds. The Manhattan Institute research center says if state planners were forced to report pension plan solvency using the same criteria the state requires private companies to adhere to, it would show that the shortfall is actually a massive $10.9 billion.

If Walker is serious about saving state finances, he will have to get a lot more drastic. And that is what the real war in Wisconsin is over—not this year’s budget cuts, but next year’s and the year’s after that. What both Scott Walker and union leaders realize is that the state’s financial problems are only beginning. And the battle is over who will ultimately end up footing the bill.

But if unions are willing to take pay cuts as union leaders claim, what is all the controversy in Milwaukee about? Why have opposition senators left the state in order to prevent a Senate vote on Walker’s legislation? Can’t everyone just work together to solve the budget problem?

In this case, the real impasse is over collective bargaining.

Collective bargaining is really a misnomer. It has little to do with bargaining and is much more akin to extortion.

Collective bargaining laws require the state to “negotiate” with unions. They deprive the state (taxpayers) of the right to say “no.” This is why states across the U.S. are estimated to have a $3 trillion shortfall between what politicians have promised unionized public employees and what they have actually saved for.

The fact that states with collective bargaining laws can’t say no to unions means that even if politicians are not bought off or extorted by unions, unions can still force concessions from them—at the expense of taxpayers. In Wisconsin, because of collective bargaining, Department of Corrections workers have been given the right to call in sick to work and then go and work a shift and get not only sick pay, but overtime for the shift work too. These are the kinds of outrageous perks that will be at risk if collective bargaining laws are repealed.

And it is these kinds of “deals” that have not only broken state budgets but also many American businesses.

Yet, despite well-known examples of unions forcing businesses to pay employees not to work, not to adapt, not to innovate, some commentators claim that the reason unions are disappearing is some nefarious government or Republican plot. The truth is, the decline of unions is the result of their actions. They have extorted themselves out of work.

America’s unionized companies simply cannot compete with foreign competition. Instead of the unions working with business to keep it competitive, they have hamstrung American business. In the early 1900s, when America’s railways were converting from coal to diesel power, unions forced railways to continue to pay the coal shoveler on each engine—even though coal was no longer used. Companies were forced to pay a man to ride each train and do nothing. They couldn’t even give him another job.

History has shown that all too often unions will rather die than make concessions. And die they have. The result is that we buy shoes and computers from China; underwear from Honduras; televisions and washing machines from Mexico; cars and trucks from Japan, Korea and Germany; customer services from India; copper from Chile; and oil from Venezuela.

To fix this problem, America is left with only two choices. Either it raises tariffs and barriers of trade against other nations, starting a trade war, which in today’s volatile climate could morph into hot war. Or Americans are going to have to meet the competition of workers in other countries by drastically lowering living standards.

Obviously, Americans are not going to do much of the latter.

But unions have made America’s middle class, you might point out. Shouldn’t we protect them? In one sense you would be right. Unions have helped make America what it is today.

Following World Wars i and ii, American manufacturing stood unrivaled in the world. The competition was either broke (UK and its Commonwealth) or bombed to rubble (Germany, Japan, Russia, etc.). Coupled with scientists gleaned from around the world, America became the world’s leading center of technology and innovation.

With little or no competition, business boomed. Unions made sure American workers got their fair share of the bounty. They shortened work hours, increased pay, negotiated perks, brought fabulous benefits compared to labor conditions as they existed previously. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of unions has been child labor laws. And without unions, industrial ownership in the United Sates might have followed the Chinese custom, where the rich live in mansions while employing multitudes of low-cost serfs.

Unions played an integral role in making America’s middle class—that is a fact of history. But today, they are destroying it.

Not satisfied with their achievements, labor unions went all out to get all possible from their newfound positions of strength. As Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in an April 1985 Plain Truth article, “A new ‘get’ economic philosophy infiltrated labor unionism. No longer was a single company a ‘team’ where all worked together against rival competition …. But now capital and management became the enemy of labor.”

Unfortunately, the general philosophy of unions has become: delivering the least amount of work possible while deploying the weapon of strikes to force the highest possible wage. Compounding the problem, each year thousands of people leave high school (with or without a degree), enter the workforce, and, because of unions, get paid lavish salaries and big pensions. It simply isn’t sustainable. Unions make merit-based pay obsolete. No wonder so many manufacturing jobs have gone overseas.

Unions have become the oppressors. And not just of businesses, but of their members too. In many states, you cannot even work for government unless you are a part of a union. In Wisconsin, if you want to become a teacher, you have to join a union. If you want to be a policeman, you have to join a union. If you want to be a parks employee, you have to join a union. If you want to shovel snow for the government, you must be a union member. And of course you have to pay them union dues—or you don’t work.

It is pure greed and corruption.

Yet it is not only unions that are destroying the economy. Unions were a response to the greed of big business. When big business held the power, it took every selfish advantage. And given a chance, it would do it again. It is just that today, the unions have swung full circle and become the bigger problem.

It is just human nature: Whoever has the power uses it for selfish advantage, often regardless of the harm to others.

Greed in general is destroying America. As Herbert Armstrong wrote, “‘Get’ seems to have got us all! The ‘get’ incentive is the root cause of all the world’s troubles and evils.”

The result is that, as Stephen Flurry wrote yesterday, the protests are only going to get worse and flow over into other states. The Washington Postwarned on Friday that Wisconsin risks becoming the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights.

Union leaders perceive a threat to their power. Wisconsin is just the first battleground, and unions from around the country are rallying to the cause. Other states with broken budgets are proposing legislation to curb unions. Unions will not go down without a fight—that is just human nature. The 70,000 pro-union protesters in Madison are just the beginning of much bigger rallies and much more violent protests to come.

If you want a solution to America’s problems, the answer is the way of give—cooperate, serve, sacrifice, help, share. “The world forgets … that peace, happiness, contentment, joy, are spiritual qualities!” wrote Herbert Armstrong. And “there is a basic spiritual law [that] governs not only these spiritual conditions of well-being, but universal economic prosperity as well!”

It’s the law of love and of give—the opposite of get. Unfortunately, as Mr. Armstrong also said, the world is trying to beat that law, but is being beaten by it!