Unions’ Manipulation and the Possibility of Revolution

As Rhode Islanders contemplate the significance of the AFL-CIO’s apparently getting its way and killing a public referendum on public financing of the proposed PawSox stadium, and as we consider the possibility of pouring hundreds of millions of dollars of debt into building and fixing schools that local governments failed to maintain, and as House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello collects around $90,000 at a single fundraising event, Megan McArdle’s musings on government unions and might-as-well-be-government unions are worth a read:

… as the Times notes, both the cost of labor and the amount of labor that’s used contribute a great deal to those bloated bottom lines. Why does Paris, with its feisty unions, manage to use fewer workers than New York City, and get jobs done for a fraction of the cost?

Because New York unions are politically connected, and for various reasons, the American government is particularly vulnerable to capture by these sorts of interests, especially as regional partisanship hardens. New York City is a one-party town in a very blue state; while New Yorkers may occasionally vote for a Republican mayor or a Republican governor, the down-ticket offices are filled in the Democratic primary. Those politicians have no interest in angering a large segment of their base that has a lot of cash for campaign contributions, and is well organized to turn out and influence elections. And the finance industry throws off such a vast river of cash that they can get away with bloated construction budgets. So no one has any incentive to crack down on wages or featherbedding.

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Unionization and the sheer size of government have combined to create a political system that is in large part dominated by people voting to give themselves other people’s money.

In a free market, somebody selling something (including his or her labor) is constrained by the possibility that the customer will simply go elsewhere or forgo the purchase.  As insiders endeavor to make sure that Rhode Island taxpayers do not have the choice to forgo the purchase of a new PawSox stadium, we can see how the constraint on labor unions in modern Rhode Island is not far short of the possibility of actual revolution.

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