KICKING LABOR WHILE IT'S DOWN

It is truly an amazing thing that the MSM (main stream media) has covered the breakup of big labor so much over the last week without mention of how anti-American labor always has been. You're tempted to think that labor has become like a cancer that hasn't spread in so long that they have forgotten it really is potentially very dangerous. But, in truth, the Democratic MSM never regarded it as a cancer; instead to them it was and is an ideological ally and favored special interest group, despite having no American principles whatsoever.

Even since Karl Marx declared "workers of the world unite" there was a fear that the left would spread Communism to America through labor. The Democrats saw an opportunity to exploit the communist momentum. They saw the communist future, as they famously said, and they believed it worked, but communism had a very bad name among freedom loving Americans. So, while being very careful not to call it communism, they sought to organize labor with the promise of higher wages for less work through extortion. They quickly found Democratic allies in the gov't who were happy to legalize this economic extortion scheme and take, in return, the money and votes that would come with it. Like Marx, the Democrats pretended they were helping the little guy to earn a fair wage and reclaim his birthright with the elaborate communist scheme without the communist name.

America was brilliantly conceived of as a free country in which all economic transactions were voluntarily entered into by free people making their own choices to buy and sell. If you wanted a higher wage you had to persuade a person, who was free to say, "no," that he would benefit by paying you, a higher wage for your labor, or price for your goods and services. That usually meant you had to have more education, more skills, work more efficiently, work harder, and/or produce a better or cheaper product. That was the incentive mechanism of progress that got mankind from the stone age to the Space Shuttle and the Plasma TV.

A union seeks to reverse economic progress out of economic ignorance and Democratic exploitation. Instead of getting a higher wage by being worth a higher wage to a free employer, the union seeks to get it through extortion: "give it to me or I'll go on strike, and with my Democratic friends in Washington I'll make it illegal for you to fire me while I'm on strike." This has nothing whatsoever to do with economic progress. It is one part economic ignorance and one part the Democratic exploitation of labor for their money and votes. It is shameful, disgusting, and anti American.

In addition to teaching workers to get ahead by extortion rather than by contributing to economic progress, it doesn't work monetarily . If an employer is coerced into paying a higher wage he then has to raise prices in the exact amount of the higher wages in order to pay the higher wages to his workers. This means that consumers suffer a lower standard of living in order to pay the union a higher standard of living. It is perfectly impossible for the union scheme to have a net benefit to society. They, in effect, steal the money, with the help of Democrats, from poorer Americans who are often not in high wage unions and who never realize that their money is being stolen by unions, and Democrats who brazenly pretend to be the preternatural champions of the poor.

While the Democrats have legalized this domestic extortion, they have not been able, despite their best efforts, to prevent Americans from raising their standard of living by buying cheaper and better goods from overseas. This means that unionized American companies must close down and eliminate the union labor that made the higher priced, lower quality domestic goods. Unions therefore have destroyed major American industries, caused huge unemployment, not raised the general wage level, stolen from the poor, and deposited workers in the unemployment lines without a sense of how to contribute in a free country.

So what do Democratic unions do now after having destroyed many of America's key industries and after having created millions and millions of unemployed? Simple: they go to their Democratic friends in Washington and say: "make this insane extortion illegal before we do even more damage to America than we already have done." Surprise, as it turns out extortionists don't really care about damage. Now they want to organize service workers; especially gov't service workers, whose jobs are already too good and too expensive. An ad in the paper for a gov't job will often produce 100 times the number of applicants as a similar job in the private sector. The Democrats figure these jobs can't be exported overseas so easily, and so the rest of us will then have no choice but to submit to the higher taxes the union extortion may require. Prayfully, this will be the final dead end for labor given the absurdity of gov't allowing labor to organize against gov't, and this time, directly and obviously against taxpayers too.

Let us pray the Democrats are suddenly afflicted by a bout or morality or that the Republicans become so powerful as to illegalize the unions all by themselves, or, more conservatively, that recent divisions within labor render them even more impotent than globalization has. But, pray as we might, we can never expect the MSM to report the truth about labor.



comments: bje1000@aol.com
Ted Baiamonte