-By Thomas E. Brewton
Labor unions make us poorer and they prolong recessions.
Senator Obama’s short-sighted support for wealth-redistribution taxation and for socialist labor unions is nothing new for Democrat/Socialist politicians.
Both in England and in the United States, labor unions led the political assault to overwhelm the individualistic traditions that made those nations great and to impose socialistic planning and regulation.
Between 1933 and 1940, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal nationalized agriculture, promoted the expansion of membership and power of communist-led labor unions, and pushed businesses into the National Recovery Administration (NRA), an imitative version of Mussolini’s Fascist state corporatism.
Liberal-progressives support labor unions because they are, along with the extortionate, class-action tort lawyers, the largest contributors and get-out-the-vote organizations wedded to the Democrat/Socialist party. See Labor Unions: Socialism’s Shock Troops.
Proposed Federal legislation to eliminate secret balloting for workers in union organizing elections, by increasing union membership, will be a major force in socialist wealth redistribution. Unions extort higher wages and benefits, usually beyond their economic worth when measured by international standards. Unfortunately, the effect is to push us all downward toward equal, albeit lower, incomes.
Increased unionization means paying workers more than they are worth in the free market. That reduces the number of jobs, because businesses have to keep total labor costs in check, or they will succumb to foreign competition. Today, GM, Ford, and Chrysler are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, because their union-inflated labor costs are so much higher than those overseas and in non-union foreign auto plants in the United States.
For another aspect of labor unions’ baleful effects, read Labor Unions Prolonged the Depression: Obama wants a new Wagner Act.
So, hang onto your hats after next year if Congress enacts massive new welfare-state benefits programs, raises taxes, and panders to labor unions by raising tariffs, restricting free trade, and curbing outsourcing of over-paid American jobs. The prospect is for a re-run of 1970s stagflation.
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Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776 http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Thomas E. Brewton