Labor Unions - To Drive Out Demons By Beelzebub

Trigger

I just (10/2/2013) read excerpts of the unfortunately to verbose book titled “STRIKERS, COMMUNISTS, TRAMPS AND DETECTIVES” by the Allan Pinkerton as well as following Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877.

My thanks go out to Google that they have digitized so many books so they are finally easily readable by a world audience on the Internet. Great job! However, the scanning of the above book is of very poor quality!

A Faustian Pact

Democracy can easily descend into the tyranny of the majority in violation of civilization, individual liberty, and the rule of legitimate law. Labor of course represents the majority! This is one reason why it is so critical to remove barriers to entry etc. so that more people can become entrepreneurs!

Is it possible the the constant fear of revolution, the threat of Communism, frequent and violent labor unrest, lawless labor revolts have convinced the by majority elected legislators that to grant special legal privileges to the formation and operation of labor unions was a lesser evil than to uphold the principles of civilization, free enterprise, and individual liberty? 

Was this a trade off between liberty and security/order/safety Benjamin Franklin so famously warned us of?

Countervailing Power

Countervailing Power was another one of those misguided concepts invented by humans promoted by e.g. Kenneth Galbraith in his book titled “American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power” (1952). Among other things, one of the tenets of their advocates was that big business should be countervailed by big labor so they would maintain some sort of balance of powers, because big business had advantages over labor. What a purpose driven naivete!

Of course, the coercive power of government was needed to establish big labor in gross contravention of the U.S. Constitution.

Instead one should ask if big business or large corporations are not a sign of lack of competition or explicit or implicit government protection.

The Alternative

Looks like our so often dim witted legislators could not imagine that laborers/employees are free to form their own companies or cooperatives to compete with so called capitalists. To force owners of companies to negotiate with government sanctioned labor unions is unconstitutional and a serious violation of liberty and property rights.