Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Economy, Free Markets, Freedom, Politics, Regulation, Taxes, The United States | Tags: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Laborers International Union, Right to Work Laws
You may have seen this excerpt from Hillary’s speech to a labor union group. It’s not one of her finer moments, but the attention all goes to her harsh yelling, and not to what she is saying. Of course she is opposed to “Right to Work” laws. Democrats depend on generous donations from labor unions made possible by forced unionization and forced dues. Democrats have always been far more interested in big donations than in individual freedom. Here’s Robert Barro, a professor of economics at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution:
Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and religion. For a teachers union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teacher services to all public school systems in a state—or even across states—can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust violation than to a civil liberty. …
Here’s James Sherk, Senior Policy Analyst in Labor Economics, the Heritage Foundation, testimony to the Wisconsin Senate Committee on Labor and Government Reform, last year before Wisconsin’s passage of Right to Work Laws:
Research confirms that unions pay more attention to their members in right-to-work states. Union officers earn substantially greater salaries in states with compulsory dues, even after adjusting for costs of living. When union officers must earn workers’ support they spend less money on themselves. …
Right-to-work laws have economic benefits that go beyond protecting workers’ freedom. Union contracts make businesses less competitive. One recent study compared companies whose workers narrowly voted to unionize with those who narrowly voted against unionizing. It found the unionized firms were 10 percentage points more likely to go out of businesses within seven years.
Here’s a paper from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, explaining the changing nature of work, and regulatory barriers to success.
The facts of economics or the way things really work are often counter-intuitive — Hillary shouts that Right to Work is “wrong for workers and wrong for America,” but that is Democrats usual emotional response, and the basis on which they control and regulate. Financial support trumps the concerns of ordinary workers every time. Workers and businesses do far better in Right to Work states, as does the state’s economy. Right to Work laws do not prevent anyone who wants to belong to a union from belonging — it only prevents unions from forcing membership and expensive dues upon anyone who does not wish to join. Usually thought of as free choice, or free people.
Public sector unions are even more pernicious, for the people who have to pay for higher demands and benefits are the taxpayers, yet they have no say at all in the bargaining process, and politicians who benefit from union support and money aren’t, as you may have noticed, all that careful with taxpayer money.
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American Elephants 
Reblogged this on The Arts Mechanical and commented:
It’s rants like this that do not make you look good
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Comment by jccarlton September 25, 2016 @ 8:48 pm