What just happened in Wisconsin, in a nutshell

A conflict of interest feedback loop, between elected officials and public employee unions, was weakened.

The loop works like this:  elected officials receive campaign funds from the unions, and the union employees receive ever increasing pay and benefits in return.  The elected officials prioritize the interest of the public employees over that of the taxpayers who elected them, thus the conflict of interest.

This is playing out in other places around the country.  New Jersey, Ohio, etc.

In a larger context, remember the Federal stimulus program?  A significant chunk of that money was funneled to the states, to postpone the day that they'd have to deal with their own budgetary Armageddon.  It wasn't so much about creating jobs, as it was about saving public employee jobs, to keep the money flowing into the campaign coffers for candidates of a certain party.

It didn't work, as shown by what happened last November.  I think enough people have woken up and seen that scheme for what it was - a form of cozy corruption.

One of the funniest things about the whole debacle in Wisconsin was the comparison some in the media made between the pro-union protesters and the anti-regime protesters in Egypt.  That comparison was exactly backwards.  The anti-regime protesters in Egypt were more like the people who swept the entrenched party out of the U.S. House last November.  The pro-union protesters in Madison were more like the pro-Mubarak protesters in Egypt, who were trying to defend their cozy arrangement and the status quo.

All that being said, I'm not disparaging the value of the work done by public employees.  What I have a problem with is where feedback loops like this ultimately end up.  Once the elected officials become entrenched and no longer accountable, because they have this sort of systemic corruption insulating them from the will of the people, then the people no longer have representatives, they have rulers.  And such systems inevitably become more corrupt, like third world dictatorships, over time.