More on Right to Work

My FFF op-ed this week is titled "The Fight Over Right-to-Work."

And if you haven't had enough on the subject, Gary Chartier and I respond to Shikha Dalmia's defense of right-to-work laws (at Reason.com) in our Center for a Stateless Society commentary, "Right-to-Work Legislation Is Not the 'Good.'"

TGIF: Right-To-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition

TGIF today ventures into the treacherous waters of "right-to-work" laws, noting that a previous generation of libertarians and Austrians opposed them, realizing full well that at least some people intended them to neutralize the Wagner Act's compulsory-union provisions.

Read it all here.

Other good reads on the subject are here, here, and here.

Latest Scribblings

TGIF: There’s No Such Thing as Economic Freedom

Op-ed: The Wisconsin Union Fight Reconsidered

TGIF: Individualism, Trade-Unions, and “Self-Governing Combinations”

[I]ndividualists more than anyone will see the merit in any arrangement which minimizes the chance that one will be subjected to the arbitrary will of another—even in consensual relationships.

Read TGIF here.

Gotta Read this

Something of Kevin Carson's that I just found:

If libertarians like to think of “a fair day’s wage” as an open-ended concept, subject to the employer’s discretion and limited by what he can get away with, they should remember that “a fair day’s work” is equally open-ended. It’s just as much in the worker’s legitimate self-interest to minimize the expenditure of effort per dollar of income as it’s in the employer’s interest to maximize the extraction of effort in a given period of time.

For the authoritarian “libertarians” who believe “vox boss, vox dei,” this suggestion is scandalous. The boss is the only party who can unilaterally rewrite the contract as he goes along. And it’s self-evidently good for the owner or manager to maximize his self-interest in extracting whatever terms he can get away with. Oddly enough, though, these are usually the same people who are most fond of saying that employment is a free market bargain between equals.

For most of us who know what it’s like working under a boss, it’s a simple matter of fairness that we should be as free as the boss to try to shape the undefined terms of the labor contract in a way that maximizes our self-interests. And most of the Wobbly tactics grouped together under the term “direct action on the job” involve just such efforts within the contested space of the job relationship.

Further, these are the very methods a free market labor movement might use, in preference to playing by Wagner Act rules.

Read it all here.

TGIF: The Wisconsin Labor Brouhaha

[E]ven free-market advocates with a natural sympathy for labor in the corporate state find it hard to side with government employees. How can one sympathize with state school teachers when the government should have nothing to do with education? This doesn’t mean teachers are bad people, but they do the work of a bad system, and their unions are among the most powerful lobbyists in any state capital.

Would the working conditions of state workers become intolerable if their unions were restricted? Not likely. But if they did, would it really be so bad if state governments had trouble finding employees?

The rest of TGIF is here.

The Truth about the Welfare State

I can't recommend too highly Kevin Carson's latest at the Center for a Stateless Society. "Giving Back With a Spoon, Taking With a Shovel" is a brief but excellent introduction to the American political economic system and the fundamental short-coming of most right-wing "free market" analysis. Choice quote:

The main effect of most government policies is to increase entry barriers, minimum capital outlays, and overhead cost of small-scale production, and to reduce the amount of idle land and cheap capital, so as to minimize the number of self-employment opportunities that wage employers are forced to compete with for your labor. And by putting a floor under the cost of subsistence, the regulatory framework increases the size of the minimum revenue stream the average household needs just to break even, hence increasing workers’ demand for hours of employment relative to the supply....

I believe the overwhelming trend of income transfer is upward (but more indirect and less visible), and that the direct and visible downward transfers involve just the least possible fraction of this enormous sum required to reduce outright homelessness and starvation below politically destabilizing levels.

Read the entire article and you'll have an idea of what left libertariansism is about.

While you're at it, also read Carson's "Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model" (pdf) for excellent revisionist history on the labor movement.