Thomas Sowell has a superb column today on the mythology surrounding labor unions. They want people to think they’re all about helping workers live better, which occurs all at the expense of plutocratic stockholders.
Unions are businesses (non-profit, but businesses nevertheless) that make lots of money for their officials by acting as a monopoly middleman for labor. They do not create value, but extract it from productive enterprises. Some workers are made better off in the short-term but others are worse off, and the long-term effects are almost uniformly bad, except for the union bigwigs.
The one point I wish Sowell had focused on is the very idea that unions should be a matter of majority rule. If a majority of the workers at Company A want union representation, they have no more right to compel the minority to accept it than a majority of the people in a city who want Religion A have a right to compel the rest to join or support their church.
