The public employee unions run this state, and are running it right into the ground. Everyone in politics knows it, and increasingly everyone else is figuring it out. Conventional wisdom is that the unions are too powerful to take on, but I can remember when people said the same thing about the Soviet Union, another tyrannical power that fell 20 years ago today when the Berlin wall came crashing down.

I was in Berlin within two weeks after the wall came down. I flew there because I had to see it for myself. I traveled in the Soviet Union just six months earlier and concluded that the east bloc countries would never see freedom, at least not in my lifetime. The Soviet Union was just too powerful, or so it seemed.

At the time I was there, soldiers in the East German military were still officially under orders to shoot anyone who came near the wall. The world had completely changed, but no one had made it official. I wanted pieces of the wall so I bought a sledgehammer and chisel and was hacking away when a soldier snuck up on me. I thought for sure I was going to be arrested. Instead, he took the tools, gave them to an East German woman who was standing nearby, and told me to get out of there. He left, and she turned around and said “These aren’t mine” and handed them back to me. I went back to knocking pieces off the wall.

I have seen firsthand the oppression of tyranny and also how the most powerful tyrannies can fall faster than anyone thinks is imaginable. The citizens of this state have more power than they realize – it’s time to take this state back.