In Maryland, “speaking truth to power” often makes you unpopular – and gets you de-elected.
 

So it is with former state senator Jim Brochin, who has performed a valuable public service but undoubtedly made himself a pariah in Maryland’s ruling party by identifying one of the root causes of the state’s current budget crisis:  its teachers unions.  For many years, these cartels of labor have bought politicians, infiltrated the state’s education bureaucracy, and gaslighted parents into thinking they have the best interests of their children at heart.  Tactically, this has been brilliant.  Educationally and economically, not so much.
 

The unions’ greatest triumph, of course, has been the "Blueprint for Maryland's Future," advertised as a "once-in-a-generation chance to fundamentally improve our public schools."  But as Mr. Brochin has said (and as MPPI has been warning for years), it “is a financial disaster.  It’s going to take the state down.  Somebody’s got to stand up and say enough, and nobody is doing it.”
 

The Blueprint was a Trojan horse:  disguised as education reform, its fine print included innumerable giveaways to the teachers unions that should have been the subject of collective bargaining at the local level.  Hugely expensive elements like the statewide $60,000 salary minimum and the doubling of mandated “collaborative time” became state law, tied the hands of local school officials, and imposed a heavy burden on Maryland taxpayers.  All for little evidence of benefit to students.
 

Mr. Brochin is to be commended for blowing the whistle on the unions’ capture of Maryland’s legislative branch.  Many legislators are former teachers or union members; many of the rest depend on the cash and blocs of votes the unions deliver in exchange for their loyalty.
 

All this means that we voters have to wise up.  Too often, we assume a teachers union endorsement means the candidate serves our children’s interests.  In reality, such candidates have a conflict of interest:  we elect them to negotiate with these labor monopolies on our behalf, not seek their favor and serve their interests. When we read campaign literature, we should therefore translate ‘endorsed by the teachers union’ as ‘disqualified.’
 

And, of course, this lesson applies more broadly, inflating the cost of government and complicating the delivery of services.  It is why no less a progressive icon than Franklin Delano Roosevelt was deeply suspicious of public sector unions, saying that “collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.  It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management."  Quite so – but long forgotten in Maryland, and to our detriment.
 

Stephen J.K. Walters (swalters@mdpolicy.org) is the author of Boom Towns:  Restoring the Urban American Dream, and Chief Economist at the Maryland Public Policy Institute.