If only he wanted to. Matt writes:
I actually think I am pretty cynical about government. I’ve learned a lot from my various libertarian friends, from my seminar with Robert Nozick, from libertarian blogs, etc. and I think public choice economics is a very important perspective. The upshot of this is that, as a general matter, I’m considerably less enthusiastic about regulatory solutions to policy problems than are most liberals.
Sadly, though, the upshot of my libertarian-infused cynicism has mostly been to push me left of where I used to be on domestic policy issues. It’s cynicism about government and the political process that, for example, has made me much more enthusiastic about labor unions and much more hostile to means-testing entitlements than I used to be. If I believed that the deliberative democracy people weren’t naive fools, I’d be much more sanguine about various "third way" approaches to things.
Matt is probably the closest I will ever get to thinking I could be a Democrat. But I am not sure what he is favoring in his post.
One view is that a once-and-for-all change favoring labor unions would produce a stream of ongoing benefits greater than we could achieve through smaller piecemeal government interventions. On empirical grounds I am skeptical of our ability to manipulate the union participation variable in a very useful way, and that is assuming I were to like labor unions more than I do (I do like them somewhat; I am not a union-basher, but I am not nearly as keen on unions as Matt.) Union participation varies largely with whether "unionizable" sectors of the economy expand and contract. Clearly we are headed away from labor unions as manufacturing shrinks as a percentage of gdp.
Another view, not excluding the first, is that Matt has abandoned Rawls’s "publicity condition." That is, he is willing to advocate policies he knows to be bad, out of fear that they prevent a political tidal wave. Means-testing Medicare, for instance, might lead the whole system to lose favor and collapse. Therefore we shouldn’t means-test, even if the idea taken on its own terms has merit. I don’t dismiss this possibility.
If Matt is willing to admit I am right about unions (I am pretty sure about that one), I am willing to call the other question a draw. Deal?
Addendum: Here is Matt’s new book-to-be.
I’d say that you have a substantial difference of opinion with Yglesias (and with me) on governmental ability to easily affect the percentage of union participation. The manufacturing sector isn’t largely unionized because of some fundamental difference between manufacturing and service work, it’s unionized because it was organized at a time when the legal climate made organization much easier than it is now. Make it possible to organize by card-check, for example, and put some teeth in the prohibition on firing workers for union participation, and I’d be willing to bet you’d get a huge jump in union participation for a fairly small policy intervention.
And don’t forget the choice of not joining a union at all, which some workers do not have the choice of doing.
Oh great more unions. Just what we need, politics in the private sector. As if politics has not brought about enough carnage in the public sector, lets just expand its influence within something that we actualy do well in the U.S, the private sector.
Means testing doesn’t work as well in heterogenous societies, like the US, as in homogenous societies, like Japan or Finland. People are more likely to support help for the poor when they identify with the poor.
Means-testing Medicare, for instance, might lead the whole system to lose favor and collapse. Therefore we shouldn’t means-test, even if the idea taken on its own terms has merit.
Don’t you mean, therefeore we should means-test, so that maybe we can get rid of the damned thing.
The political problem is that in an educational meritocracy, as John Derbyshire pointed out today, all the articulate members of the working class get siphoned off into the middle class or above, so there is nobody left to eloquently advocate working class interests against the vast array of self-interested chatter put forth by the better-educated classes except for a handful of eccentric middle class class-traitor intellectuals such as Pat Buchanan and Michael Lind.
In the old days, big unions gave the working class an institutional heft so big that its voice was loud enough to be heard.
Clearly we are headed away from labor unions as manufacturing shrinks as a percentage of gdp.
Actually, Matt addresses that point http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2006/08/post_1303.html“>elsewhere today with a post about the problems the writers on America’s Next Top Model are having with organizing a union.
“willing to advocate policies he knows to be bad, out of fear that they prevent a political tidal wave”
–Wait, isn’t this exactly what economists say the fed should sometimes do in order to maintain its credibility and public trust.
Why don’t the Unions start their own companies that use only union labor ?
Power in a society is always acquired by the most successful thugs and crooks. Democracy works because it is a sort of antitrust mechanism-it prevents any one group of crooks from obtaining absolute power, and forces them to compete with each other for power. This is probably an extreme, and somewhat Hobbesian view, but I think it is at least partially true.
The same principle applies on a smaller scale at an industrial level. If a union gets too powerful, it defeats the very aim of maintaining worker’s rights and kills industry. If employers become too powerful, workers get the short end of the bargain and lose out. I think the real problem is to balance the two against each other- rather like needing to have an antitrust law against unions. So, I think Yglesias’ cynicism about government applies equally well to the functioning of unions.
When producers of goods organize to set prices we call it “collusion” and “price fixing” and set the federal goon squad on them.
When producers of labor organize to set prices we call it a “union,” use the force of the state to compel consumers of labor to buy from them, and permit them to engage in acts of violence to protect their cartel.
Unions benefit union members at the expense of *everyone* else, just as trade restrictions benefit domestic producers. I cannot say that one is irrational for supporting unions, only evil.
No, Noah, when producers of goods organize we call them corporations.
I cannot say that someone who would say collective organization is only permitted for the best off among us is irrational, only evil.
“No, Noah, when producers of goods organize we call them corporations.”
No, Jon. Unions are cartels, and thus probably not good under normal situations. (See my post above.)
Now, if groups of workers wanted to get together, get
volume discount on skill-enhancing training, and brand
themselves and sell their labor through their own non-profit or for-profit firm, then that would be the logical equivalent of a corporation, and it’s perfectly legal.
Unions, however, are price-fixing cartels, and price-fixing is not legal for any other economic entity.
Please explain to me why a hundred people pooling their money to buy a hundred sewing machines and form a corporation is good while a hundred seamstresses forming a union and then contracting to run those sewing machines is bad? What is the difference between people combining their labor and people combining their capital?
Of course unions can form cartels or get so large that they run into anti-trust problems, but so can can corporations. Just demonizing unions as cartels is unconvincing.
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