Comments on: Workers of the World, Don’t Unite!

By: Zach Bibeault

Zach Bibeault — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:44:58 +0000

“it seems perfectly likely that unions are often, at most, partially counteracting the effects on workers’ compensation of persistent state support for the corporate elite, and so helping to restore wages to what they would be in a genuinely freed market.”

Possibly, but no one can say for certain. As Kinsella has stated before, big corporations are often suspect of being part of the political class but it can’t necessarily be known if (or if so, how much) they would be smaller and less dominating in a free market.

I know you’re not endorsing coercion-backed unions, but I think it’s important for others to remember that supporting coercion-backed unions in an effort to counteract the effect of coercion-backed corporations is merely enacting big government to attempt to solve a problem caused by big government — which has led to most of the expansion of the State that we can see.

By: Chris Baker

Chris Baker — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:19:08 +0000

Thank you, Tom. Keep in mind that almost all these attacks on unions come from people who have spent their entire lives in academia and/or think tanks. These people have little or no experience in the real world.

Those of us who live and work in the real world feel differently. I’ve been in IT for over ten years, and I would love to see some form of unionization. However, I don’t want to see the old types of unions.

My biggest fear with unions (and others share this fear) is that they will make it more difficult to fire people who deserve to be fired. That being said, we have the reverse without unions. Far too many people are fired who definitely do not deserve it.

Libertarians would do well to drop their idiotic anti-union bias. It might also put them more in touch with real people who do real jobs in the real world.

It’s also no accident that as unionization has went down, the number of hours that people work has went up. It is absolutely obscene that companies today are having people work 60 and 70 hours a week when there are good people out of work. People gave their lives for the 40-hour work week, and now we see people give it up without a fight.

By: Stephan Kinsella

Stephan Kinsella — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:50:40 +0000

Gary, great point, but I’m sure we all agree here that the use of the term “freed market” means you should be shot, right? Pugnacious enough?

By: Mike Gogulski

Mike Gogulski — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:35:58 +0000

No, no! It’s just not possible! (cower)

By: JOR

JOR — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:43:21 +0000

I think DiLorenzo would probably take the standard Blockheadian line that labor organizations not only wouldn’t, but couldn’t, exist at all in a free market. (Which is about as convincing as arguing that firms wouldn’t, nay, couldn’t exist in a free market).

By: Tom Knapp: ‘Libertarians against markets?’ | Independent Political Report

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:17:05 +0000

[...] Update: Just noticed that Roderick Long hit substantially the same topic from substantially the same direction yesterday. His choice of [...]

By: RTRebel

RTRebel — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:35:52 +0000

I don’t think DiLorenzo is attacking voluntary labor unions and organizations in general, but he’s condemning the unions that used violence to achieve price floors for wages. If these wage increases occurred voluntarily, it wouldn’t be “raising wages above the market price” but really updating the market price on wages. Subtle difference but a significant one!

By: Bob Kaercher

Bob Kaercher — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:32:03 +0000

“In the real world of actually existing capitalism, it seems perfectly likely that unions are often, at most, partially counteracting the effects on workers’ compensation…”

Well, maybe for the workers who are members of state-certified unions, but what about the vast number of those who are not? Aren’t they in fact paying higher prices for union product even as they toil under state-capitalism? For non-union workers, aren’t today’s state-approved unions actually a part of the state-capitalist apparatus that’s exploiting them? In fact, I think I’ve seen points by LLs that that’s what unions have done: Sold out to big business in exchange for a seat at the table of power.

I think the points left-libertarians make about how statist variety capitalism privileges many capital owners over laborers are important points to make, I just don’t know that they necessarily lead to support for unionism. Seems like another example of “second-bestism” that a lot of libertarians of all different prefixes defer to that seems to wind up validating some aspect of the statist machine.

By: MBH

MBH — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:51:48 +0000

…And those Randian Supermen turn out to be less “men” and more “alien.” (I’m referring to Roderick’s description of Randian epistemology as blind to already established knowledge, thus making the Randian character into an “alien-explorer.”) If only Rand stuck to her Nietzschean roots, she would have ended up with Ubermenchen instead of extra-terrestrials.

By: Kevin Carson

Kevin Carson — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 02:49:43 +0000

Excellent point. Brad Spangler raised the same issue in an anti-union piece at Mises Blog: the same people who blandly assert that unions can’t raise wages over the natural wage determined by productivity, would never dream of denying that hard bargaining is part of the price discovery process in any other area of economic life, or suggest that people ought to simply take whatever offer is tendered.

I think DiLorenzo makes a second implicit assumption: the wage offers that prevail in the present system (or rather, that would prevail if the present system were the same in all particulars except the absence of unions), ARE the market-clearing wages.

JOR’s point about spontaneous orders is an excellent one as well. I’m sure there’s some Hayekian point to be made about the hubris involved in dismissing the consequences of killing off thousands of species a year, or of hand-waving about geo-engineering as a solution to global warming from CO2 emissions.

BTW, what’s the name of the guy jumping up and down with the bombs in the cartoon? I want to write him in on the 2012 ballot.