Yesterday when I was going out for lunch I saw something really nice. I saw two police officers helping an old man down to the subway by carrying his zimmer frame down the stairs. Seing that actually made me really happy about being a tax payer in this country. A lot of things are being said about the way the police works – I can only say one thing, I want to see more of that stuff!

But then again, nothing lasts for ever…

Later that day when I met a few of my colleagues I heard about an SMS campaign directed to all members of the Swedish union called Kommunal regarding the upcoming election for the EU parliament. The SMS contained a message saying something like:

We hope you are not forgetting to vote red this sunday!

It should be noted that this quote is freely formulated based on the interpretation of the verbally communicated contents of the SMS, I haven’t seen the actual SMS myself. However, looking at Kommunals website you can find that same message being repeated in several other places, one exampel of it being this page (for those of you who aren’t fluent in Swedish the text in the banner with the red heart says “Vote red for a red Europe”).

What I can’t quite grasp is why a union would assume that its members have a particular political opinion or even direct them to have a specific opinion! This specific union is primarily aimed at having people working in tax funded areas as its members. This means that the money it receives in members fees is mainly coming from the wages payed to workers by the state – i.e. money coming from taxes payed by me and the rest of this nations tax payers.

So the final question is: how much of our tax money got wasted in the process of producing this campaign? It would’ve been better to just tell your members to vote. Period.