Via Mickey Kaus, check out this explosive column by Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal.

The central battle in our time is over political primacy. It is a competition between the public sector and the private sector over who defines the work and the institutions that make a nation thrive and grow.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy’s order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities. This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions—The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers’ National Education Association.
They broke the public’s bank. More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members’ dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.

This is extremely tough language that many on the left will find intemperate and overdrawn. It does, as Kaus suggests, explain a great deal about today’s political landscape. Henninger, to his credit, also offers a gentle critique of Republicans.

This is why New Jersey’s Chris Christie won running on nothing. It’s why in California Carly Fiorina is within three points of Sen. Barbara Boxer. It’s why the party JFK enabled, “the machine,” is hitting the wall.

It really is true that Christie won running on nothing but vaporous promises, and Henninger’s implicit suggestion is that Fiorina, a singularly unimpressive candidate, is running on much the same. I would be harsher on Republicans. While it’s true that Democrats are more dependent on the public sector workforce and its endless expansion, Republicans are increasingly dependent on segments of the “private” sector that rely heavily on taxpayer dollars and favorable regulations and other invisible transfers, ranging from subsidized agriculture, subsidized resource extraction, subsidized home-builders, and defense contractors.

To the extent we’re dealing with a battle between the public sector and the private sector, my sympathies are with the latter, and with civil society more broadly. Yet let’s not kid ourselves into believing that the private sector hasn’t been shaped — one could say warped — by rent-seeking. This is one reason why I think it is vitally important for conservatives to maintain critical distance from Republicans as well as Democrats. Curbing the growth of government isn’t about favoring some industries and regions over others. It is about spending discipline that attacks weak claims and not weak claimants.

One hopes that there might be some common ground between right and left in dealing with the ever-expanding public sector. A few weeks ago, Matt Yglesias, an idiosyncratic thinker who is unrepresentative in many respects, wrote an eloquent post on the dangers posed by the public pensions crisis.

High up on my list of sources of national doom that people don’t talk about enough is the looming fiasco in pensions for state and local public employees. For obvious reasons, no governor or mayor wants to raise taxes or cut spending to give public employees a raise. But a public employee strike is also bad politics. So you can promise people generous amounts of money in the future via a defined benefit pension plan, and kick the can down the road.

The danger for the left, he goes on to suggest, is clear.

I think a high-tax regime is much more politically viable than American conventional wisdom would have you believe. But the viability of high-tax political units is driven by a belief among citizens that they are receiving valuable public services in exchange for their taxes. Paying off pension obligations to now-retired public employees, however, doesn’t fit that bill.

As for whether the left will embrace this message, I recommend taking a look at some of the derisive comments, which condemn Yglesias as an elitist who “hates public employees (and their unions)” and retirees.

Elitism is an interesting charge. There are Salams who’ve worked in the public sector and Salams who’ve worked in the low end of the private sector labor market. And I have to say, the advantages of working in the public sector are abundantly clear. This is not a sustainable situation.

Take a look at ”An Unexpected Source of Income Inequality” at Political Calculations, a post I found via Will Wilkinson. The expansion of the federal workforce appears to be exacerbating income inequality. In itself, this is far from a dispositive case against the expansion of the federal workforce. But in light of the political incentives at work, it does merit some attention and concern.