Liberalism is a mental disorder

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z ... tioned_in/

[_beastie]

It's funny how the right-wing seems to think that employers will act benevolently in the interest of their workers when it comes to the issue of unions, but think that "job-creators" are so fundamentally self-interested that they won't create all those jobs if their taxes are a couple of percentage points higher.

People who pay attention know why the republican party has declared war on unions. It's not because unions are inherently problematic. It's because unions are a primary source of funding for democrats. They're trying to dry up revenue for democrats. Plain and simple. And if workers suffer a little in the meantime, the end justifies the means.

[_Droopy]

Insofar as the government employs people, the terms of negotiation for their labor is just as much an aspect of the free market as anything else. And legally restricting it is a curtailment of economic freedom.

There are no free market dynamics involved in the doing of government work, or in the pay and benefits involved (unless you think a political decisions on how much to pay a public employee are driven by market forces and price signals).

Secondly, all of the money flowing through government and ending in the paychecks of government workers, part of which ends in dues payments to public sector unions, much of which goes to lobbying and political activities focused on increasing the pay and benefits of public sector employees who exist at the expense of productive private sector workers, and who's entire livelihoods and job classifications exist at the expense of their fellow citizens, and who lobby for the expansion of the government programs and agencies - which exist at private sector expense - in which they work at the expense of their fellow citizens, was originally private sector money, but its presence in government paychecks and public sector union coffers does not represent private sector economic activity (that's already occurred in the past, and the existence of public employee paychecks is testament to its past existence).

In all honesty, I have no idea what you're talking about here. The private sector is not the public sector, and the two have little, if anything in common.

The government when acting as an employer reserves the right, just as all employers do, to reject or accept contractual terms from individuals negotiating or people negotiating together. While it may be in the interest of those the government employs to wield their vote in their economic favor, it is also the case that others have a countervailing interest to wield a vote in favor of the fiscal interest of the government. In practice, this push/pull ends up working comparably to how it does in the private sector with unions. Regarding government jobs, union workers, on average, tend to get paid a little less than non-union counterparts in income but receive much better job stability and retirement security.

None of this is remotely relevant to my core point, which is that public sector unionism, being public sector unionism, is an inherently corrupt enterprise that is inimical to a free, self governing society grounded in limited government by consent of the governed. It is, by definition, a vast and inherent conflict of interest between the class of unionized public sector employees and their fellow citizens.

There is no such thing as "labor."

More quality posting on economics from Droopy.

Yup. The point is that "labor" is a term of collective class solidarity that has not been sociologically or economically relevant for generations, but still exists as an ideological weapon.

You're against unions because Republicans are, not because you have any ideologically consistent beliefs.

The actual truth of the matter here is that I am against unionism because of ideologically consistent beliefs. Sorry to disappoint you. I am not against the desire or attempt to form a labor union. That is an aspect of a free society that any group of employees is free to embark upon. I am unalterably opposed, however, to forcible, closed shop unionism, the right to walk back into a job after walking off it in a strike; the vast powers of legal, political, and physical coercion and intimidation granted to unions during the Roosevelt administration against business and union members fellow citizens; the use of baseball bats and other weapons to violently prevent other workers willing to work at what the wage labor market will bear ("scabs") from feeding their own families when union members have, of their own free will, walked off their jobs; and the herd collectivism of the union mentality and culture.

The problem is that, in the 1930s, unions and their members were legally exempted from many of the rules and constraints of civil society and given vast coercive powers over employers and over non-union workers seeking employment in certain industries. The unionism of today is the progeny of the effects of that era upon the union movement.

This is one of those issues that separates out those who say they favor free market policies because they are in the pocket of large business interests and those who favor the free market itself because they think it maximizes liberty and/or produces the greatest good for the greatest number people.

Yes...right.

While the free market is good for business in general, it can hurt individual business interests.

Yes, as we saw when Netscape and Linux went after Microsoft in the 90s because the free market wasn't going their way. Or in the case with "green" technology, most of which has no economically viable market in the private sector, and hence, must rent seek to survive.

Large, established businesses are notorious for pushing the government to enact regulations that give unfair competitive advantages to the detriment the health of the market and the welfare of the people.

Yes, they most certainly are.

Suppression of unions is a case in point. Like the Republican party, you're pro-established business interests more than you are pro-market.

And I'll now wait patiently for a rational, logically grounded body of argument that makes that case. In the meantime, however, my views of free market economics are based, as are all aspects of my worldview, deeply and firmly in philosophical and moral principle (and, as I have no connection to any big business whatsoever, I could hardly be in their "pocket." But then again, this ad hominem diversion has kept the AGW gravy train on its greased tracks for nearly 20 years now, and apparently, it hasn't lost any of its staying power).

[_Droopy]

Yes, people who run businesses are not going to behave according to their economic incentives and drive down the cost of labor to maximize their gain. They're going to pay and treat people fairly out of a sense of benevolence. Adam Smith was wrong. It is by the benevolence of the breadmaker...

Employers are, in general, as human, humane, and concerned with the welfare of others as are employees. Employers are not a separate class of human beings with a different moral and ethical structure. They are your and my neighbors. In an unhampered free market situation, employers pay employees what the market for their labor or skills will bear in a competitive market; in essence, what they contribute to the productive process itself. As their productivity, skill, and value to the company rises, their pay rises (it must rise, or the employer will lose the employee to someone else willing to pay what the wage labor market is supporting for those skills and for less tangible attributes like long term loyalty to the company and innovative ideas).

The pivotal point is this: employers do not and cannot ultimately choose what they pay their employees (unless they wish to defy the disciplines of the market and reap the consequences). The market - the consumers - ultimately set wages, salaries, and prices as they determine who survives and who is not viable among countless producers and providers of goods and services.

All the history of legal repression of unions corresponding to horrible working conditions and compensation and legal allowance of unions corresponding to a rapid increase in standard of living among the working class is totally coincidental.

There was no broad increase in the standard of living among the working classes due to unionism save among union members. Those frozen out of unions so as to keep labor scarce and its price always on the rise, who's jobs were destroyed because their employers could not compete with artificially high union wages, and who paid higher and ever higher prices for goods the costs of whose production due to gross inefficiencies introduced into productive processes by union shop work rules, resistance to new technology (up to the point of physically destroying it (for just one example, the mass destruction of electric typewriters by unionized manual typewriter producers), were continually on the rise, did not so benefit.

Wages were rising throughout the last half of the 19th century and on into the 20th across the board in tandem with, independent of, and in spite of unionism, not because of it. True, wages were a good deal higher, and became ever higher as time went on, for unionized workers, but that benefited unionized workers, not all workers, nor certainly consumers, at who's expense much of this union gravy was extracted.

[Guest]

There is no such thing as "labor." That's an old, hoary leftist shibboleth that attempts to corral human beings into perpetual, rigid class relations with other ideologically useful classes ("management," "Wall Street," etc.).

Fine, we can't be bothered with such semantical illusions as labor and management, let's run all companies as democracies.

If you want to get rid of 'labor' and 'management' classes, just run all corporations on worker owned cooperative model as the Mondragon Corporation.

During the 'Great Compression', when labor was strongest, there was the greatest inter-class economic mobility. Now that Unions are weak, and the gap between the wealthy and lower and middle classes is widening, there is less economic mobility. Classes ARE becoming more entrenched.

The idea that if we somehow stopped talking about classes that they would cease to exist doesn't appear to working outside the Chicago School of Economics.

Employers are, in general, as human, humane, and concerned with the welfare of others as are employees.

Decades ago, I first read this passage from Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower" concerning the early life of Socialist Kier Hardie. It made an indelible impression on me:

Born in a one-room cottage on a Lanarkshire coal field and brought up with two adults and nine children in that room, where somehow his mother taught him to read, he went to work as a baker's errand boy at the age of seven. On one weekly payday, with his father out of work and his mother in bed with a newborn child, the family's small and only breadwinner walked the two miles to his employment through the rain, to arrive for a second day in a row 15 minutes late. "You are wanted upstairs by the Master", said the girl behind the counter. Entering a room where the employer and his family sat around a mahogany breakfast table with steaming rolls and hot coffee, he was told he was dismissed, and as a reminder against lateness, his week's wages were forfeit. On his way out, the maid in silent pity gave him a roll.

"Corporations are people, my friend", as Governor Romney admonishes. Yes, Corporations are people, as well as picnics on the 4th of July and Genocidal Armies. Can we just stipulate that ALL nouns of assemblage referring to people ARE people?

The important thing to ask is what is the nature of a corporation? Is it democratic? No, it is plutocratic. Wealth and power control a corporation. Talking about Employers as being your friends and neighbors is a canard. Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder to maximize profit. Concern for the employee is not part of their fiduciary responsibility.

The pivotal point is this: employers do not and cannot ultimately choose what they pay their employees (unless they wish to defy the disciplines of the market and reap the consequences). The market - the consumers - ultimately set wages, salaries, and prices as they determine who survives and who is not viable among countless producers and providers of goods and services.

Ah, the 'invisible hand' of the Market, the Capitalist's Delphic Oracle, and ultimate abdication of personal responsibility. "It's not my fault. The market made me do it", says the Pakistani businessman who employs the 8 year old child to make soccer balls.

If item X costs 12 dollars when it is made by child labor in and 20 dollars when it is made by Union labor, is the ONLY criteria the purchase price to the consumer?

Back in the bad old 1990's when the economy was going great guns and unemployment dipped below 5%, each time the Federal Reserve met there would be a shiver through the markets: Would the Fed raise interest rates?

Why would the Fed raise rates? Because if there is full employment, employers will have to compete for employees. Wages will rise, which will exert pressure on prices. Periodically the Fed would raise interest rates to put the brakes on the economy, TO KEEP FROM HAVING FULL EMPLOYMENT.

The reality is that a capitalist system does not like full employment. It NEEDS unemployed people to work. In terms of Management and Labor, it favors a buyer's market, rather than a seller's market.

[_EAllusion]

The idea that if we somehow stopped talking about classes that they would cease to exist doesn't appear to working outside the Chicago School of Economics.

The heck? What about Chicago school economics fails to acknowledge the existence of economic class?

The problem with Droopy's labor comment is that he hears the term and makes a semantic connection between that and something he assoicates with leftist rhetoric. But in context my use of the term labor just means effort in exchange for goods or services. Labor negotiation just refers to what people try to get in exchange for their work. Collective bargaining is simply a way of strengthening their negotiating hand, and it isn't a shock that when you suppress that tactic, the worker gets a worse deal than they otherwise would have. There are specific people and specific jobs that don't benefit from unions, but the term "labor" is an aggregation. Droopy on the one hand is calling for letting the market set wages and working conditions while on the other calling for government regulation of the free market state in favor of businesses which will suppress compensation.

[_EAllusion]

Perhaps this is a simpler way of expressing the problem -

Let's have a state that passes a law that says the government may not negotiate with unions. This is perfectly with the realm of a free market act. The people are the operators of the business in question - the government - and reserve the right to employ this tactic.

Here's the thing. People should still have the right to unionize and strike if they want to. Just as the government can refuse to negotiate with them, they can refuse to negotiate unless their terms are met too.

The former is legal. The latter is not. That's suppressive.

[_Analytics]

My takeaway from this discussion:

Droopy thinks employers pay workers precisely what they are worth. EAllusion thinks employers pay workers what they negotiate.

That leads to Droopy thinking unionization forces employers to pay folks more than they are worth which leads to all sorts of sub-optimal outcomes. EAllusion thinks that unionization is simply a free-market negotiating tactic.

I of course agree with EAllusion--all prices--including the price of labor--are set according to what is negotiated--not with some inherent true value.

[_EAllusion]

As it happens, I am a member of upper management in a decent sized company that is non-union. I am a director of programming for intellectually impaired adults and oversee a variety of people, including other managers, in that role. As such, I have to be involved in strategy to prevent us from unionizing. Interestingly, 80% of that is simply making sure we don't have a disgruntled employee base. Unhappy workers unionize. Happy ones aren't nearly as likely to. So the best strategy to stop those union cards from getting turned in is to keep people happy.

So we adopt policies to make the work environment more beneficial to the employees in part because we want to stop the union. The take away here is the mere existence of unions, and their threat to take over, produces a better outcome for our non-union workers.

[_Droopy]

Fine, we can't be bothered with such semantical illusions as labor and management, let's run all companies as democracies.

All companies should probably be run as businesses.

During the 'Great Compression', when labor was strongest, there was the greatest inter-class economic mobility. Now that Unions are weak, and the gap between the wealthy and lower and middle classes is widening, there is less economic mobility. Classes ARE becoming more entrenched.

This is simply false. There are no "classes" per se in America, in the sense they had existed in the early decades of the 20th century and as had existed in the centuries before. Americans generally move in and out of various socioeconomic strata throughout their working lifetimes, and this has been, progressively, the norm since the end of WWII and the explosive economic growth of the American economy since that time. There are no stable, enduring "classes" in America in which people find themselves, by either birth or socialization, permanently defined and which they become locked into as core aspects of their self identity, as was once much more the case (some people still see themselves that way, of course, but that's their choice, and not a fundamental feature of the social environment or the nature of the economy). This is not to say that various socioeconomic levels exist in which people congregate, based on skills, background, and personal preference in work, but that many just don't stay their for extended periods in a dynamic, growing, opportunity economy such as has characterized America, for the most part, since WWII.

Unionism hit an all-time high of about 40% of the American workforce in the 1950s, and has been in decline ever since, and in steep decline over the last 30 years, but the vast bulk of its benefits were always internal to its members, and had no effect, and in many cases, detrimental effects, upon non-union workers in overwhelmingly unionized industries and upon the economy as a whole.

The idea that if we somehow stopped talking about classes that they would cease to exist doesn't appear to working outside the Chicago School of Economics.

"Class" as a definition of rigid, fixed, stable socioeconomic categories is an ideological atavism, politically useful to the Left and to what remains of unionism, but detached from actual socioeconomic reality.

Decades ago, I first read this passage from Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower" concerning the early life of Socialist Kier Hardie. It made an indelible impression on me:

Born in a one-room cottage on a Lanarkshire coal field and brought up with two adults and nine children in that room, where somehow his mother taught him to read, he went to work as a baker's errand boy at the age of seven. On one weekly payday, with his father out of work and his mother in bed with a newborn child, the family's small and only breadwinner walked the two miles to his employment through the rain, to arrive for a second day in a row 15 minutes late. "You are wanted upstairs by the Master", said the girl behind the counter. Entering a room where the employer and his family sat around a mahogany breakfast table with steaming rolls and hot coffee, he was told he was dismissed, and as a reminder against lateness, his week's wages were forfeit. On his way out, the maid in silent pity gave him a roll.

One of the reasons I have always been, and will continue to be a conservative, is because I prefer to think with my mind, and not with my emotions, and not to conflate the two. In that lies grave danger.

The important thing to ask is what is the nature of a corporation? Is it democratic? No, it is plutocratic.

A corporation is a company that is open to public investment and is managed by a board of directors, a CEO, and other corporate officers.

Wealth and power control a corporation.

Actually, managers, boards of directors, and stockholders, to various degrees, control a corporation.

Talking about Employers as being your friends and neighbors is a canard.

Its simply a truth.

Corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholder to maximize profit. Concern for the employee is not part of their fiduciary responsibility.

These kinds of assertions aren't even worth discrediting anymore. Unfortunately, the naked evil and misrepresentation contained in and masked by these ideas much be continually combated and defeated across the generations. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Ah, the 'invisible hand' of the Market, the Capitalist's Delphic Oracle, and ultimate abdication of personal responsibility.

Actually, its just what happens in a free economic order where human beings have individual liberty to pursue their dreams, prosperity, and well being in the economic sphere.

"It's not my fault. The market made me do it", says the Pakistani businessman who employs the 8 year old child to make soccer balls.

Pakistan? Well, that's not America, and not even the West. A very, very different cultural situation. Making apples and oranges comparisons across radically different societies and then pointing the finger at "capitalism (which at this point I'm quite convinced you have no understanding of whatsoever, to be frank) is not philosophically substantive, in my view.

If item X costs 12 dollars when it is made by child labor in and 20 dollars when it is made by Union labor, is the ONLY criteria the purchase price to the consumer?

No, but that's not the only choice that exists in a democratic capitalist system, nor is the child making item X necessarily worse off making it than he would be digging for tubers in his village, rummaging through a landfill, or simply starving.

Back in the bad old 1990's when the economy was going great guns and unemployment dipped below 5%, each time the Federal Reserve met there would be a shiver through the markets: Would the Fed raise interest rates?

Why would the Fed raise rates? Because if there is full employment, employers will have to compete for employees. Wages will rise, which will exert pressure on prices. Periodically the Fed would raise interest rates to put the brakes on the economy, TO KEEP FROM HAVING FULL EMPLOYMENT.

1. Wages rise because and as productivity rises.
2. Higher wages don't necessarily create price inflation unless such wage increases are artificially imposed and do not reflect market dynamics. High consumer demand causes prices to rise, which attracts more entrepreneurs into that field, which creates greater competition between producers, which exerts downward pressures on price. Wages rise as workers become more productive, and prices can fall dramatically over time (consumer electronics) as wages rise and benefits are substantial.

The reality is that a capitalist system does not like full employment.

In the first place, there is no such thing as a "capitalist system." Secondly, the primary reason full employment is hard to come by is because of government or government/private sector, special interest restrictions on the creation of (massive taxation, pervasive, unnecessary regulation, minimum wage laws etc.) or entry into (union restrictions of the available wage labor pool, artificial qualification requirements, "medallions," etc) job opportunities.

It NEEDS unemployed people to work.

Logically, this is like claiming my restaurant needs waiters, cooks, and dishwashers. Its a logical banality. Waiters, cooks, and dishwashers need restaurants to make use of their abilities, and restaurant owners need people with those skills. That's simple what happens in an economically and socially free society; people come together to get things done for the purpose of creating wealth for themselves. Its called, "work." Its all a part of an open, free, uncoerced market society. Of course an employer needs employees. Is this a great discovery of some kind? Is there some great moral drama in play within it?

Without unemployed people who need work, there would be no one to employ. All available labor would be tied up in already existing enterprises. How could I open a new factory with no one to use the machines and produce the product? Why, indeed, would I try to start a new business in an economy that was essentially in a state of perpetual stasis? I wouldn't. In such a system, I'd already be employed somewhere by definition (employment is always "full"). This would appear to be an economy in which all innovation, technological progress, and economic expansion had utterly ceased. A sudden appearance of unemployed people would signal a great moral defect in the existing system (not the failure of a business or natural waning of a certain type of product or service), while under normal, non-ideological circumstances, unemployment means that consumer tastes and demands are changing, a business model has failed somewhere, technology is improving, and the economy is expanding overall, while the market (all consumers) weed businesses that provide goods and services that are no longer desired or relevant out of the market.

Believe it or not, Met, the end of horse drawn carriages, buggy whips, whale oil lamps, manual typewriters, the cotton gin, and feather ink pens were good things, and represent overall progress for humanity. Refrigeration was a great boon to mankind, even though it displaced an ice block making industry that supplied countless people with blocks of solid ice with which to cool their food and drinks. That caused unemployment, as did the displacement by the internal combustion engine of an entire industry and culture constructed around the horse as the primary mode of human transportation.

The personal car and the airplane destroyed countless jobs in the commercial rail industry, just as central air conditioning replaced electric fans for most people in the West as a means to stay cool in the summer. Is this all to be looked upon with a moral scowl?

No, what actually happened is that, over time, the vast majority the people displaced by new industries, technologies, and consumer demands were absorbed back into a growing, diversifying economy as it continually expanded and created ever more and varied opportunities and jobs, both in quantity and variety. The "creative destruction" of the free market is fundamentally a constructive process, eliminating jobs and job categories here and there, as one's fellow citizens determine that they are no longer viable, and creating new forms of the same industries, or entirely new industries in their place. Unless the state cripples and/or destroys this process, in the name of making life "fair," that process will continue and provide the vast majority with the goods of this world in far more profusion and quality than any other means of economic organization could ever approximate.

When you meddle with and corrupt these processes to a fair degree, you get Britain and Western Europe. When you meddle with and corrupt these processes to a much more severe degree, you get the Soviet Union.