-By Chuck Muth

“In 2020, this town will be more unionized,” predicts D. Taylor, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas. “The question of going union has been enhanced by the recession.”

Yeah, right. That’s like saying your marriage has been enhanced by having an affair with the wife of your best friend. I mean, who would ever buy that one?

No, what this recession is actually enhancing is the fact that unions don’t create or provide jobs; unions merely exploit the jobs created and provided by others.

Consider a recent Las Vegas Sun story which noted that “members of the Culinary Union, the state’s largest and most powerful union, were registering for food baskets” this past holiday season. Why? Because no matter how large and powerful the union appears to be, it doesn’t create jobs. Businesses create jobs. Unions create food baskets.

And while unions don’t create jobs, they do kill them.

The allure of organized labor is the delusional promise of job security combined with above-market wages and benefits. But you can only keep piling on for so long until the bottom falls out. Just ask all those former high-paid union employees at America’s steel mills and auto factories.

Like leeches, unions feed off the jobs that others create. And once they bleed the host dry, the leeches die as well.

This is the reality that union bosses such as D. Taylor never seem to grasp. Indeed, union agitators would rather a business go out of business – killing off the jobs created by that business in the process – than allow the business to operate without the union getting its “taste.”

Witness, for example, the opening of Glazier’s grocery store in southwest Las Vegas last fall.

Glazier’s is an independently owned and operated facility that created hundreds of new jobs. The store’s owner, Bill Glazier, got his “first job was as a bagger and cart boy at a grocery store in Long Island, New York,” notes Southwest View. “He eventually worked himself up to owning four stores in the Philadelphia area, which he sold in 2000 to retire.”

But the 64-year-old job-creator said he and his wife, Helen, who co-manages the store, “quickly found out that retirement is overrated.” So they rolled the dice and opened a new store in Las Vegas in a highly competitive market and in the middle of the worst recession in modern memory.

That takes….well, you know.

In any event, the store opened with union pickets walking around in circles babbling mindless chants on the sidewalk in front of the store. Why? Because the grateful workers inside opted for good-paying jobs without union representation, that’s why.

What Nevada needs to pull itself out of this jobless recession – enhanced by Sen. Harry Reid’s multi-billion dollar “stimulus” program which stimulated nothing more than higher unemployment – is more risk-takers like Bill Glazier and fewer sponges like D. Taylor. We should be encouraging, not protesting, the job-creating, revenue-producing Bill and Helen Glaziers of our community.

And that includes getting the government to get off their backs.

The fact is you cannot tax and regulate businesses into job-creating profitability. High taxes and ridiculous regulations kill the entrepreneurial spirit, which kills business creation and expansion, which kills jobs. And yet, what did the 2009 Nevada Legislature do?

It doubled the license tax imposed on people like Bill Glazier who dare to open a new business, and expanded that tax to penalize people like Bill Glazier who dare to open up additional locations. Then, adding insult to injury, it doubled the employee head-tax penalty on people like Bill Glazier for hiring people.

To borrow a phrase, “totally psychotic.”

You wanna create jobs and pull Nevada out of this recession in no time flat? Simple: Tell the government and union bosses such as D. Taylor to get the hell out of the way and let men like Bill Glazier do what men like Bill Glazier do. This isn’t exactly rocket science, kids.