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Jan. 5, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:58
43 Unions (Part 2)
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Good afternoon!
It's Steph.
It is Unions Part 2, which is, I guess it's Thursday afternoon on January the 6th, 2006.
So to continue from where we left off this morning, when you are a union leader, and again we're just talking about amoral economic self-advantage here.
We're not talking about, you know, the right or wrong thing to do.
We're just talking about maximizing your Resources by purely economic means.
So what you want to do is you want to eliminate competition as we talked about before and there's a couple of ways to do that.
But there's sort of two major competitors that you need to make sure that you get rid of.
And the first is the competitor which is just somebody working within your factory but not Joining your union, and the second is a business starting up that doesn't have to employ your people, the people who are part of your union, and thus sort of bypass you in the whole process.
And as an economy matures and the benefits of unionization become clear, then the market will very strongly tend to eliminate unions from the equation as middlemen that aren't required.
So, of course, here's where, in the absence of a state, you really can't do that much.
I mean, you can do sort of a certain amount of private thuggery, but in order to do that, you have to already be within a union, within an existing organization.
You can't just sort of go and beat up some local store because you want to unionize the employees.
You can't go and beat up other people and sort of mess around with them that way.
So you really can only work to maintain your existing unionization.
And as it becomes economically unproductive for the unions to be there, in other words, because capitalists provide the benefits to their employees that the unions would have fought for, but without all the overhead and risk of the unions, then as that occurs, you're going to sort of wither away, right?
The unions are going to wither away.
But of course, unions aren't so keen on withering away I guess no more than you and I would be keen of if our jobs were to wither away.
So they do what they can to maintain their benefits.
And, of course, a union leader should understand this, right?
It should not be surprising that they understand this.
I mean, unions came into being because capitalists, let's just say this, right?
That capitalists were exploiting workers.
So the capitalists were acting for their own advantage in the absence of caring for their workers in a productive manner.
So, we accept that this fact can occur.
In other words, that human beings can choose to act to maximize their advantages without regard for those who they are in a contract with or who they represent.
So, given that that's the case, we know that's the case.
So, of course, union leaders are subject to this corruption as any capitalist or any politician or any general or anybody, any cop.
Because we know that human beings are capable of this, because there is such a thing as unions.
So, of course, the union leader would have no problem in saying that, you know, the capitalists that I was brought in to fight are people, I'm a person, therefore I or my sort of co-members or those who come after me are perfectly capable of acting in a corrupt manner to maximize
Resources at the expense of those were in contract with so You know just logically we know that the unions are capable of doing this and that people do act for their own self self-interest So there's There's three sort of main weapons that you want to get your hands on if your union and
And I'll sort of mention them here just in case I do my usual thing and start off with three and maybe end up with two or four or some other number at the end.
So you have three weapons that you want to get your hands on.
The first is you want to ensure that you create categories of occupation that you control and prevent anybody else from doing that labor.
Right?
So let's just say you are a union representing people who like to work with piping and plumbing and toilets and so on.
So what you do is you create a category called licensed plumber.
And then you force, through the agency of the state, through the power of the state, you disallow anybody else who's not licensed as a plumber from working on plumbing stuff, right?
So now you are the union, you control the title of plumber, and you now know for sure that nobody else is going to be able to do that plumbing work without joining, without your licensing, right?
So this is a little bit different from a closed shop, and it works mostly with contractors, right?
So you're a plumber, an electrician, a roofing guy, a tiling guy, whatever.
You're going to create A licensing which is enforced by the state which you control and what that does is even if you don't have a sort of Factory where you can control people by sort of keeping an eye on them You ensure that people have to join the union in order to do their jobs, right?
You really really really want that because then you don't have to provide value for them other than what we've talked about in terms of negative economics you are avoiding, through them getting the license from you, they're avoiding being thrown in jail or being fined or whatever, well, being thrown in jail, it all comes down to that.
So that's one thing that you do and that avoids the problem of people scattering out from a factory to pursue their jobs individually and they don't need a union and so on.
So licensing is one.
The other thing that you want to do is you want to get closed shop situations.
Closed shop situations are those wherein if you want to get a job on a factory floor at GM, you have to join the union.
You have no choice in the matter.
The union will just deduct its union dues from your paycheck and, you know, whether you like it or not, it's too bad.
Which, to me, seems a little bit similar to the exploitation that unions were originally put in place to fight against.
But, you know, such is the cycle of all things man-made.
So, that is the second issue that you want.
And the third way that you want to ensure that You keep the natural tendency of the free market to undo the value of unions.
The third thing you want to do is you want to make sure that if you go on strike, that strike breaking is illegal, right?
So you've got licenses, which means that you can control people who want to do a job, whether or not they want to be part of the union, whether or not there's any benefit to them being part of the union.
And secondly, you want to create a closed shop environment so that everybody who joins or who wants to work in your factory or ideally in all factories, you know, within an occupation, there's a combination of closed shop and licensing, has to belong to the union.
And the third thing you want to do is petition your local friendly police force or the government to ensure that nobody can sort of break through the strike barrier, right?
Nobody can cross the picket lines and go and strike.
And of course this is what unions did, right?
This is what unions do.
Now, there's sort of two other considerations that you also want to get sort of tucked away, right?
The first one, which is I guess another kind of exclusionary mechanism that could be considered a fourth one, I just didn't really think of it until now, which is that you want to make sure that you lobby to raise the minimum wage.
And you want to do that for two reasons.
The first is that when you raise the minimum wage, you keep unskilled people out of the marketplace.
Because, you know, to be honest, a lot of what the people who are in unions do, and I'm talking about the blue-collar unions, not necessarily the sort of doctor's unions, but a lot of what they do, you know, frankly, you know, it's not unskilled, but it's really not that hard, right?
Like, it's not like getting a PhD or getting a master's or it's not like the legal risk that you face if you're a doctor or You know, the thousands of books and articles you have to master if you're going to be a lawyer, or, you know, the decades of time it takes to become an excellent manager or business entrepreneur, or, you know, the years it takes to become a great computer programmer.
You know, putting in some piping, you know, I'm not saying that it's simple, and I'm not even saying that I could do it, but, you know, it's something, if the Romans did it, it's probably not that hard, right?
And it's the same thing, there's nothing particularly new in the world of electrical energy, and, you know, roofing and tiling and so on.
So, it's not that hard to do.
Again, I'm not saying it's unskilled and I'm not saying that everybody who does it is a moron.
I put my standard sort of working class hero shoulder to the wheel here so that nobody thinks that I'm thinking less of these people.
But, you know, fact of the matter is brain surgeon is hard, janitor not so much.
So, you know, the problem is that a lot of this stuff can be done.
It does not require real language skills, right?
I mean, somebody else can sort of translate for you and tell you what to do and then you can work for a day or two with little supervision once you understand the principles.
So, you know, you don't need a lot of strong language skills.
You don't need a lot of education.
You sort of watch and learn for a couple of months and then you can pretty much do it.
So, the problem that blue-collar workers who are unionized or that unions are always facing is the incursion of the immigrant, right?
The people who've learned these highly transferable skills, right?
Like, you know, gravity and physics and water are all the same in India as they are in Canada.
So, you want to make sure that you keep those people who are coming in as immigrants out of the job market.
So, what you want to do is a combination of licensing and you want to make sure That you argue for a strong minimum wage.
So you keep lower-skilled people out of the marketplace.
And also, minimum wage tends to sort of float up union wages as well.
As minimum wages go up, union wages tend to go up.
You can see that's a pretty strong pattern.
And of course, there's two reasons for that.
One is that the unions can say, look, the minimum wage went up, our wage should go up too.
And number two, you've eliminated a number of people from the workforce by getting rid of the minimum wage.
Sorry, by raising the minimum wage.
And so, you know, the demand for unionized labor has gone up.
And of course, you can't do any of this without the agency of the state, right?
The only thing that you can do without the state is sort of bludgeon people individually, and that's really not so good.
And of course, a private police force would likely not be unionized, and so would not have much sympathy for you bludgeoning people crossing your strike lines, crossing your picket lines.
So that's sort of one thing, that's sort of one other agency that you want to do.
And then the second challenge that you're going to face when you start to put this stuff in place is, you know, what are you going to give the politicians, right?
I mean, why would the politicians interest themselves in your case?
As opposed to, you know, the case of the capitalists who don't want union wages to go up, or the consumers who don't want the price of cars to go up by a couple of thousand dollars for all of these union goodies.
Well, you know, there's some aspects of this that are complicated, but, you know, basically it's just the sort of crappy arithmetic of unlimited democracy, right?
So, those who work with their hands, like the employees, always outnumber the managers, right?
And so, you know, the managers, the capitalists, have a small number of votes and the The unions have a large number of votes and so it's, you know, the sort of grisly arithmetic of unlimited democracy is that, you know, the herd outnumbers the bride.
And so, you know, the...
The politicians will bow to the demands of the blue-collar masses or, you know, in some cases, the white-collar masses, right?
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not picking on, you know, Joe... I'm not picking on Joe Lunchbox because the same thing has occurred with lawyers and doctors and accountants.
They all have these licensing and exclusionary capacities.
And they keep out the immigrants and all this kind of stuff.
So, you know, it's everybody who uses this sort of collective bargaining process is guilty of this.
Not necessarily the blue-collar guys.
It's just that those are the ones we're most familiar with.
So forgive me if I use them as an example.
So, you're going to have to start petitioning your local friendly politician to give you these things.
Now, there's a number of reasons that they're going to help you.
The first, of course, is that, you know, more votes, right?
The second is that the consumers always outvote everybody.
But as I've talked about in another podcast, and one of the basic problems of democratic economics is that the benefits accrue to the relatively few and are easily identifiable.
Whereas the harm accrues to the many and is relatively or very unidentifiable, right?
So, you know, a sort of simple example of this is if I go to my local politician and I'm running a plant, like a plastics plant, and I say, dude, if I don't get, you know, 50 million dollars in federally guaranteed loans that I, of course, have no intention of paying back, then
You know, I'm going to have to throw 200 people out of work, and, you know, 250 people out of work, and that's going to be bad for you, bad for publicity, it's only six months until an election, they're all going to be unhappy, and all the shops are going to close down, the economic effects are going to be bad, and, you know, in the back of the politician's mind, it's also like, oh yeah, great, so now we've got more people on unemployment insurance and welfare and so on.
So, you know, the people who are going to benefit from the $100 million federal grant are clear, right?
It's a capitalist and his 200-250 workers.
So they get this loan and grant and they're all very happy and they tell everyone how wonderful everything is.
However, you know, the $100 million grant that was taken out of the pool of available capital or out of the paychecks of other people produce, you know, very subtle and far-ranging and impossible to quantify, I think, impossible to quantify economic harm, right?
It's like these tiny little sands upon a beach that you have to sort of accumulate.
So, you know, some guy has, you know, 20 bucks less in a paycheck, so he doesn't buy his kid a toy.
So, you know, the toy store has a little bit less money, so they don't buy, you know, from the toy manufacturer.
So the toy manufacturer, a whole bunch of people, that happens.
And the toy manufacturer has to lay off two people, and then some other place has to lay off three people, and, you know, it's very hard to trace the economic effects that come when you sort of give a bunch of money to one person and take it from a whole bunch of other people.
Those whole bunch of other people can't even really trace the effects themselves, especially if those whole other bunch of people are the next generation and you've done it through deficit financing.
So, the harm that is occurring to the people who the hundred million dollars is taken from, they don't even know that harm has been done to them, right?
Because, I mean, who has the time, energy, patience or focus to trace all of these economic things?
And even if you did, so what?
So, you know, for instance, these 200 guys who are going to lose their job, you know, fighting to keep it, whereas, you know, the 300 guys who would have gotten jobs if the factory had been left to collapse, they don't even know they didn't get a job because the $100 million was taken out of the economy, or taken out of the pool of available capital and given to this economically inefficient factory.
So, you know, it's hard to get mad when you're still unemployed when you didn't get a job that might have been created or that would have been created.
I mean, what are you going to do, right?
I mean, you don't even know it's happened and, you know, you couldn't trace it to a particular event even if it did.
So, it's sort of another one of the imbalances that go on and this is sort of something that unions exploit, right?
We have jobs.
We're vocal.
We're loud.
We want the jobs.
We want to keep the jobs.
We want all our benefits.
And if you take anything away from us, then we're going to get really mad and raise a fuss and write letters to everybody and, you know, picket line and violence and all this kind of stuff.
So that's a very vocal and obvious problem for a politician to deal with.
However, the people who the politicians satisfy by acceding to the demands of the sort of the loud and angry union guys, They get a specific benefit, and the money that they pay them off with is sort of incrementally taken away from everyone else, which is, you know, hard to quantify, hard to track, and impossible really to see the effects of.
So, you know, it seems like a free deal to pay off the loudmouth union guys.
Because nobody else knows what the heck's gone wrong.
So that's sort of another aspect of the problem with using state power to benefit particular groups, and in this case, unions in particular.
That's an example of how that goes wrong and why it occurs, right?
Why it consistently occurs.
Now, to talk about some of the other unions that we see within the modern western economic system, and then we'll tie it off with a related topic on unionism.
If we look at something like the doctor's union, this is a clear example of a monopoly that is set up where you simply cannot Practice medicine unless you get the seal of approval from the doctor's union.
You simply can't prescribe medication.
You can't see patients.
You can't bill the government.
You can't bill insurance companies.
You just don't have the capacity to act as a surgeon or a doctor unless you get the stamp of approval, which is different from the software industry.
I mean, I've never had any training in software in particular, and I wrote code that sold for millions and millions of dollars and had a great career, have a great career, and I've never taken a course in my life, and I don't have a sort of certified stamp from the International Brotherhood of Coders.
and sisterhood.
So, you know, that's one of the things that goes on at the sort of higher levels where you are going to make sure that you just keep people out.
You make sure that nobody who doesn't get a license from you can practice within your field and this goes on in a whole bunch of different areas.
Now, another thing that you want to do to restrict the number of people who can practice within your field is to come up with, like, unbelievably stupid lengths of apprenticeships.
This is another famous way that you keep people out, right?
So, you know, apprentices are, you know, they're sort of like the interns in the medical world, right?
They're just the indentured servants that you pay ridiculously little and who do a good chunk of the skilled work, but every now and then you kind of mutter over them, yeah, looks like you're doing okay.
Now, I mean, there's absolutely nothing worse than what goes on in the medical world with the interns.
I mean, of all of the People that you'd want to be well rested and clear-headed, it would be those dealing with medical emergencies.
I mean, there's really no other field or area where you can get a worse situation resulting from inattention based on tiredness or overwork.
But of course, that's what's done.
And why is that done?
Well, it's done so that the doctors who've gone past it can exploit the labor of these people.
And it's also done, you know, just as sort of a power trip.
But it's also done to raise the barrier to entry.
So, you know, for instance, if you want to become a carpenter and you want to join the carpenter's union or you want to become a tiler or a plumber, well, you've got to apprentice for a year or two or three.
You get paid really low wages and, you know, you get paid artificially low wages relative to the value that you're providing.
And how do we know that?
Because those rates are not set by the free market, but are instead set by unions, which are run by people who are all past that phase.
So, of course, they're going to want to diminish the salary of people coming in.
So that they can collect the differential.
So if you're paid like $12 an hour as an apprentice, as a plumber's apprentice, and your labor is worth $22 an hour, well, you know, who pockets the extra $10 in one form or another?
It's either the guy who's in charge of you, like the master plumber, or it's the union, you know, in one form or another.
You know, just in the quotes in general, or in, you know, the fact that the master plumber can charge that much more because you're being paid that much less and he's required to be around while you're working.
So, that's one of the things you do, and also what it does, of course, is this apprenticeship program discourages people from entering the field.
You know, there's a shortage of tradespeople at all times, and it's because, you know, if you have a lot of brains, you don't want to necessarily do that for a living.
Not because the work is so dull, but, you know, a lot of the people aren't particularly well-read or well-informed, and so, you know, it's not... I mean, I've done manual labor in my life.
The work is not that bad.
You can sort of while away the sort of brain-dead time by thinking about other things.
But, you know, that sort of forced socializing and, you know, let's pull on a couple of beers after work, that kind of stuff is a bit exhausting.
I didn't have much in common with the people I worked with in the realm of manual labor.
Although the work itself, I mean, you know, there's worse things to do, right?
So you want to make sure that you discourage people from coming in.
Also, a long apprenticeship program, which is supervised by sort of native speakers and native people who are native to the culture, you know, it helps them to weed out, again, the immigrants, right, coming in.
So, lots of immigrants who'd be more than happy to work for 12 bucks an hour and you want to keep those out because they may not raise their rates later on.
So, this is sort of how you bribe the people who have already gone past this process.
Right?
I mean, right away, if you say to, you know, when you're forming the Plumbers' Union, and you say to all the plumbers who are there, don't worry, we're going to make sure that, you know, no new plumber comes in who isn't fully qualified.
I mean, this sort of evil little smugness and self-satisfaction sinks down upon everybody, because everybody gets what that really means, right?
So you're going to prevent new people from coming into the field, and that's going to keep my wages high, right?
So, the other thing that unions do is they lobby for regulations, right?
And they lobby for regulations for a number of reasons.
Regulations, you know, give more work to union members because you get to be an inspector, you get to review other people's work.
It lengthens the time that you can keep people as apprentices because, you know, hey, you got to learn all these regulations so you get to exploit them for longer.
And, of course, the regulatory wall keeps out the immigrants, the poor, you know, the minorities, those who'd be willing to work for less and so on.
And it keeps them out because, you know, you've got to learn the regulations, which means you've got to be a native speaker.
You've got to be confident about the culture and understand the law.
And, you know, last but not least, if you understand the culture and know the regulations and have good contacts with those who enforce them, well, you can just bribe people to give you a passing grade, which is a lot cheaper than actually complying with and being reviewed on all the regulations.
So, I mean, the regulations have nothing to do with consumer safety, which is nicely taken care of by the market.
But, But the regulations do keep other people out.
It does raise the skill level artificially.
It does let you keep your apprentices around, keep their apprenticeship going longer, which is more money for you.
It keeps immigrants and poor people and illiterate people out of the marketplace.
And, you know, basically it's just a cultural bias towards those who are familiar with things, right?
I remember one guy telling me, who was working on my house, he was telling me that, you know, The inspector was over and the inspector was, you know, bending his ear for like an hour telling him some stupid fishing story.
And, you know, what are you going to do?
Are you going to say, look, man, you're really boring.
Can you just, like, sign this crap off and get out of my face?
Well, of course not, right?
Because as soon as you do that, right, you're going to get that cold eyed fishy gaze and you're going to get a fail and you're going to have to appeal it.
And there goes, you know, a couple of weeks of your life.
And so nobody wants that.
And of course, the regulations are designed so that you can always find something.
Right?
The regulations are like the tax code.
They're not designed to be obeyed.
They're designed to give the state power by, you know, creating a set of ambiguous laws that you can never really quite satisfy.
So that's another aspect of what unions do once they get into this unholy alliance with the state.
And of course, last but not least, You know, and there's lots more to talk about with unionism, but I think this is sort of the major aspects of it.
And in the last but not least category, we have the biggest of all categories, you know, save the best for last.
The biggest of all categories is the fact that unions are now, you know, own various aspects of the political system.
Right, unions, you know, they collect, oh Lord, since they've started hundreds of billions of dollars, right, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars.
You know, they regulate and contribute in the U.S. elections, you know, 70, 80, 100, 150 million dollars to political candidates, right?
And of course, political candidates desperately need money because without money, you can't get elected, right?
I mean, that's how the system works.
The system requires that you have a lot of money, that you need to have millions and millions of dollars to get elected to anything significant.
And that nicely takes care of, you know, the powers that be.
Because you need millions and millions of dollars, which means that people have to give you that money.
And they're never going to give you that money just out of the goodness of their heart.
They're going to give you that money because they're expecting Specific benefits in return, right?
Favorable legislation, loans, grants, tariff walls, you know, you name it.
Whatever the government can do, people buy, they buy politicians, right?
So the system remains stable because you never get to vote for anyone who hasn't already been bought and paid for, right?
So that's exactly what they want, to avoid any possibility that somebody with integrity Or independence might accidentally slip through.
I mean, there's a reason that I'm able to do these podcasts, and that reason has a lot to do with the fact that I'm not in academics, and of course I'm not in politics, and I'm in the software industry where nobody gives really a rat's behind about what it is that I'm saying on the web.
So, you know, you want to, as a union leader, right, you want to get as much money from your members as possible.
And you want to turn that money over to the state in order to gain preferential legislation, right?
For yourself.
And that preferential legislation has a lot to do with making sure that there's just no way that the numbers of your members can be reduced, right?
So, I think it was in Arkansas under the Clintons, they put this program in place to test Um, to test teachers, right?
To see if teachers knew what the hell they were doing.
And, so they did that, and lo and behold, you know, 40, 30, 40, 50 percent of teachers failed sort of basic grammar, math, and language skills.
Yes, absolutely horrendous, right?
I mean, in any situation that would be gross negligence of a criminal order.
And, I mean, can you imagine your doctor, 50 percent of doctors failing basic medical questions?
Well, of course not.
So, you know, what happens?
Well, you know, they did this poll and, you know, they were going to fire a bunch of people, right?
But they wanted to know whether it was popular.
So they did this poll to the Arkansas people and they said, you know, people of Arkansas, what would you consider to be, you know, sort of reasonable in terms of The failure rate of these teachers.
And people said, oh, you know, 10% or whatever.
And so they said, ah, okay, well, it's 10%.
And they, you know, worked like mad.
I think Hillary Clinton was pretty involved in this, right?
They worked like mad to try and get teachers fired who had failed.
I mean, this is ridiculous, right?
I mean, you're not asking them to explain quantum physics.
You're asking them some basic questions about math and grammar.
And, you know, close to half of these teachers fail.
And they have two years with which to make up the test.
I mean, I gotta tell you, I don't remember that when I was in school.
I don't remember having really simple, quick tests and then being given up to two years to pass them and being able to study on my own time at any time that I wanted and retake the test at any point within two years.
I don't think that's exactly what the teacher said to me at the time.
It was pass, fail, and if you don't show up, you fail.
So, you know, and so what happened was, you know, there was a big brouhaha and, you know, the teachers' union went completely nuts.
Because, of course, the last thing that the teachers' union wants is for any of their members to be gotten rid of.
I mean, it's like going out to a farmer and just saying, hey, how about if I shoot some of your cows?
Well, that's no good, right?
So, of course, unions want to absolutely oppose any kind of means test, any kinds of criteria.
By which you're going to judge the efficacy of the union members because then there's a criteria of efficiency that is in there that can quite easily cause the number of union members to decline, which then of course raises questions about the value of the union as leaders and all that kind of stuff.
You know, you absolutely want to keep testing as far away from your union people as possible, which is why you get these silly situations where, you know, as a friend of mine who worked in a factory for a while said, you know, he was, you know, people got mad at him who were part of the union for working too fast.
Right?
It's like, man, you got to slow down.
You're making the rest of us look like crap.
You know, so it's that kind of silly stuff.
And yeah, I'm not saying that's the case with all union stuff.
But, you know, it's certainly enough of it that it rings true.
Another friend of mine who was working at TEMP sat down in a cubicle and he was supposed to calculate some numbers and his calculator wasn't plugged in so he reaches down to plug it in.
His boss at the time had a conniption fit because you simply cannot plug in that calculator.
And the guy's like, what are you talking about?
I do this at home all the time!
And, you know, he wasn't allowed to because he wasn't an electrician, so the electrician had to be called, and the electrician didn't come until much later in the day, so the guy basically sat there for a whole day doing nothing because he couldn't plug his calculator in.
I mean, this is not made-up stuff, right?
This is exactly how it works, and it's exactly how you would expect things to work.
When you give people the power of violence and sort of sanctimonious, pompous, self-righteous violence to maintain their economic position, right?
They're just going to put more and more restrictive rules in place to maintain more, to keep the funds going for more and more incompetent people.
So, you know, the fact that, I mean, the Democratic Party can be seen sort of as an extension of big labor within the U.S., right?
And the Democratic Party does nothing whatsoever to criticize the unions, right?
It does nothing even imaginable.
That could be done to control the power of unions.
And this is very much the case in England when I was living there in the 70s and you had, you know, meat shortages, you had water shortages, you had coal shortages, gas shortages.
I mean, it was just lunatic, right?
I mean, it's like living in the third world before Thatcher came in.
And so, I mean, this is exactly what happens when you give these people all this power is, of course, it's going to get abused.
I mean, it's absolutely inevitable.
There's no way around it.
There's no way to control it.
There's no way to ameliorate it other than by, you know, getting rid of the power, right?
You can't tell people not to use something which is cost-free and advantageous to them.
And so, you know, what happens then, towards the very end of this whole cycle, as we see now, is, you know, this freedom of association which was the basis of a valid and, I think, honorable approach to unionization.
has now turned into forced association, in that you have to join a union, you have to get a license, you can't do anybody else's job, you have to be an apprentice for a number of years, you have to be poorly paid, you can't do it if you're an immigrant, you can't do it if your English isn't okay, and none of this, it all gets so layered in these restrictive and claustrophobic little boxes, and this is naturally how things are going to work when violence is at the root of things.
And, you know, last but not least now, the forced association that unionization has degenerated into is now also forced association of possibly the most egregious kind, which is where the union dues that you are forced to pay now flow through the union to political masters that you may not have any agreement with at all, right?
So you might be some chest-thumping Republican, but because you're part of a union, the money that you pay Go straight to the union and straight to the political parties, right?
So, you know, forced subsidizing of political parties is, you know, pretty egregious, right?
Because the political parties will pass laws to, you know, further restrict your life and borrow money that your children will go bankrupt trying to repay and all that kind of stuff.
So, at that level, things just get insane.
I mean, we have a union, a huge union situation here, of course, because in Canada, like, I think, a quarter or a third of the people work for the government.
And so, the government unions are crazy, because you've got an illegal monopoly and the ability to strike.
And, you know, that's obviously unsustainable, right?
So, I mean, that's all just going to crash at some point.
But we have a sort of socialist party here called the New Democratic Party, the NDP.
Who entirely subsist upon union dues, and their entire purpose within government is to act as a front for, you know, the labor coalition, the Labor Special Interest.
So, labor is a very different kind of special interest from everyone else, because labor is one of the few other agencies outside of the government that has the power to tax.
And, you know, the only way to solve the problem is, of course, get rid of the government, get rid of the laws, get rid of all of this stuff.
But the first thing to recognize is that the amount of corruption that comes out of this kind of forced association is really, really terrible for human freedom and for human life and, you know, of course, incidentally, for the economy as well.
Well, thanks so much for listening.
I'm going to drop past the gym and then go home and see my lovely wife.
I hope you're doing well.
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