Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Unions decrease the quality of living for everyone

Unions are a dreadful thing in any society. No, not the kind of unions which, in return for dues, simply provide legal service and help people save up for holidays and bridge the financial gap between jobs, but the kind which is sheltered by the State and is legally, although immorally, allowed to use force and violence against employers.

Here is a useful quote:

"Those who tell you of trades unions bent on raising wages by moral suasion alone are like those who would tell you of tigers that live on oranges." The result of union activity, therefore, is to reduce the number of jobs in an industry and to raise the money wages of union labor, while at the same time relegating many workers, driven out of this line of work by the decreased quantity of labor demanded there, to other lines of work, whose money wages must decrease as a result of the greater supply of workers now forced to compete for them. (#)
This shouldn't be a mystery to any rational thinking person. Unions are a kind of price control, distorting the relationship between supply and demand. By increasing the price of one group of workers, they decrease the price of everyone else. By using law and State-force to uphold a manipulated price of one kind of work-labor, thereby decreasing the demand for it, all other workers must suffer with lower prices for their labor, since it is now artificially higher in supply.

The lesson? Abolish State-protection of union-activity, and returning to the time when "real wages in manufacturing climed an incredible 50 percent in the United States from 1860-1890, and another 37 percent from 1890-1914", and that's it.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

The State is Not a Market Player

The Trouble with "Just Compensation" - Mises Institute:

Even when a state buys assets from willing private interests, it cannot be said to be paying 'just compensation,' since the ones doing the compensating — the taxpayers — are not themselves acceding to the transaction voluntarily.
Heyr heyr!

Monday, December 04, 2006

Politics in USA

I think the following is a pretty clever description of politics in USA:

In general, elections come down to contests between two groups. The first consists of public-sector bureaucrats, unions, the elderly who are protecting their government checks, minority groups who cling to special privileges, the winners in the welfare-state lottery, and marginalized oddballs of all sorts who resent cultural impositions by bourgeois America. That group is also known as the Democrats.

They are not all bad because they tend to fight against policies that do not benefit them, such as those policies that help the other group.

And that other group consists of large corporations who seek mercantilist privileges, the commercial class of small and medium-sized merchants who rightly want fewer impositions from government, the Wall Street elite who favor a form of free enterprise that is compromised by loose credit and socialized protections against loss, middle-class producers and consumers who demand rising portfolios through any means possible, and the religious bourgeoisie who are always up for a good war against evil (drugs, moral deviancy, Islam, or whatever). That group is also known as the Republicans.
Full article.