Despite talk about labor unions growing up to face 21st century realities, their leaders are still socialists when you get to the root of their philosophy.

In today’s WSJ, Ron Gettelfinger, the president of the UAW, makes a pitch for socializing health care costs here. He is riding on a wave created by a recent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell.

Gettelfinger writes, “If pension and health benefits can’t be adequately maintained by individual companies — young retail giants like Starbucks or venerable manufacturing firms like GM — then it makes no sense to transfer these obligations to individual households.” Baloney. Individuals can just as well do their own investing and buy whatever health insurance they think best for their circumstances (which for many people is none at all) as they can handle other aspects of life that are thankfully still entirely private, such as buying a house, life insurance, and groceries.

Gettelfinger and Gladwell want us to believe that US firms are at a big competitive disadvantage because in many other countries, health care is a government concern and therefore companies don’t have to incur the cost of providing insurance. That’s also baloney. The total compensation package for employees wouldn’t go down if we had a “single-payer” system for health care. Total compensation didn’t go up when firms started to include health benefits because of tax benefits. The components of compensation were simply adjusted. The same would be the case if government paid for health care, or anything else. In the Gladwell/Gettelfinger world, apparently the companies with the greatest advantage would be those fortunate enough to be in complete socialist economies where the government gives people everything they need.