Free Market Colloquy

Anthony peppers me for answers!

Q. Why isn't there a free market union solution?   Competing unions?  ie, Union A takes less out in dues than Union B and negotiates better benefits.  I think I'll choose to join Union A.   OR Union A workers are more reliable than Union B workers, I think I'll contract with Union A workers to run my grain terminal.   

A. NRLB will crush the move to an oregon union, and I would not be surprised if there is a murder in regard to the oregon union move......  there are problems, therefore there are unions, not the other way around.  if there was not big govt/big biz alliance, there would not be the oppty to abuse workers, backed by govt violence.  It is govt backed violence that advances worker abuse.  Big biz would not dare do 95% of their abuses without govt backing.  So, in a free market, there would be no unions, since there would not be the power to abuse workers. If there are no problems, then there are no unions.  (This refers to field unions, not house unions, since house unions are not real unions).

Longshoremen secure twisty flexible containers on twisty flexible ships that travel of crazy seas... and they unload the same...  the work is very high skilled stuff..  most people cannot hack it... it is why of all of the unions, the longshoremen are the most problematical if and when they go on strike.

Q. In LA, for years,  millions of cars pumped smog into the air, along with burning trash, etc...,  and people were getting sick from the air pollution.  How should this have been corrected or addressed in the courts through property rights?

And,  Smog in Los Angeles didn't decrease until the late 1970s, after government regulations were imposed.   Why didn't the free market address the problem before then?   The worst day of smog appears to have been in 1943, when the smog was so thick, people thought there was a gas attack.   Since then, there was at least 30 years where the free market could have provided a solution, but didn't.  So what happened?   What would Bastiat say?

A. As soon as the lead and carbon monoxide exceeded the stench of horseshoot, about 1904, the lawsuits coming in would have brought this nascent industry to a halt, if they did not innovate in relation to legal realities.  Too late, for 60 years earlier judges began preferring big biz and "employment" to property rights.  Other wise, in some way, the auto industry would have developed a way to retain the exhaust.  Read all about it in Morton Horwitz book cited to the left.

It is a neat trick to advance the destruction of the ecology by govt fiat, and violating property rights, and then taking credit after 70 years for "fixing" the problem.  Smog is still bad, when it need not be at all.  But cosseting the automakers, like they do the banks, we pollution, war, economic dislocation, invasion of privacy, and so on.

Principles matter, and violating natural law is unsustainable policy.

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