I still remember the smell of that locker room.

Every summer during college, I worked at a plant on an industrial island in the Mississippi River. Corn syrup (the fructose in our soft drinks) was the main product, although we also loaded some impressively big barges with some sort of cattle feed.

Hours were long, days were hot (try working under a giant dryer turbine in July), and we all wore long-sleeves and jeans, plus steel-toed boots and hard hats. And were thrilled to do it.

The college program was a great deal and we knew it. A kid couldn’t make that kind of hourly wage, not anywhere. That’s why we jumped at every chance to work more: 12-hour days, seven days a week. They literally had to make us go home. We were disgusting, ripe messes by the time we got there, but we were happy.

And that was before that first paycheck came. I tore it open in the men’s locker room and couldn’t believe my eyes. It was more money than I’d ever earned in my life. I was grinning like the guy on that Enzyte commercial.

Unfortunately for me, a union employee saw the whole thing. He asked me what I was smiling about, and as only an idiot 19-year-old can, I told him. Bad move.

The next day, our supervisor brought us the news: the union foreman had gotten wind of how much the college kids were making, and from now on, overtime was gone. This in spite of not one single full-time (unionized) employee ever wanting to work more than a “straight eight”.

That was my first experience with unions. They didn’t seem right back then, and they don’t seem right these days. Oh, I know they put into place some needed protections (and things like weekends) way back when, but there had to be a reason even my grandparents and their co-workers at the sewing machine factory wouldn’t have them in their workplace by the 1940s.

Fast-forward to now. We look across the nation’s landscape and see states (if you can even call it one anymore) like California. Once the capitalist miracle of both America and the Pacific Rim, the eighth-largest economy on the planet is now more akin to that of a third-world country. It’s tens of billions of dollars in debt. And owned lock, stock and barrel by Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—the mother of all public (read: government) employee unions.

Move to the Midwest and it’s no better:  the United Auto Workers (UAW) union finally killed the goose that laid the golden eggs in Michigan, and now I guess we’re all part-owners of lovely downtown Detroit, courtesy of those federal government bailouts.

Right next door is ground zero. Wisconsin. Whether it’s the governor’s Budget Repair Bill that finally brought teachers’ unions to task or the average state taxpayer reconsidering public employee unions’ right to collectively bargain in the first place (a “right” that FDR, Samuel Gompers and George Meany—presidents of the U.S., AFL and CIO, respectively—were against, by the way), the state capital of Madison has been white-hot all winter with scheduled votes, a dereliction of duty by Democrat lawmakers, pro-union protests, and anti-union counter-protests.

Three special elections later (failed recalls of a state Supreme Court Justice and Republican legislators—with a recall for Governor Walker still yet in the works), the unions’ back has been broken. Tens upon tens of millions of dollars—much of it from out of state—plus floods of volunteers from nationwide affiliates have all seen their efforts wasted. The country is finally waking up to the fact that a transfusion of socialism into the body politic is simply bad medicine.

Americans just want to work. They understand more government (and more government employee unions along with it) just doesn’t cut it. And they vote with their feet:  moving across the country to get to states and places like Virginia. Texas. Tennessee. Right-to-Work states led by business-friendly elected officials. States that have free markets, and low (or no!) taxes. And jobs. Lots of jobs. Not to mention that certain air they have about them.

That air with the smell of freedom in it.