I The Wall Street Journal reports that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has so far refused to give its official support to one or the other of the two major parties and presidential candidates in the upcoming election (“Some Teamsters Rebel After Boss Praises Trump,” August 24). A spokesperson for the Teamsters said:
Our approval must be earned.
The meaning of this sentence is clear: an organization will legally support a candidate or party that promises to give it the most in terms of compulsory legal rights or large sums of money for its members. The Brotherhood sells its support for rights, and the government sells rights for support. A political exchange between greedy tyrants.
What state opinion can prove that? The cynical view is to think, “Our chance to get rights will come!” The vision of the angels of the kingdom includes instead of thinking, “Oh my God, that’s bad, they should (like me) unselfishly pursue the common good.” The basket of other reasons contains many strings that say the rules we live under or have decided to live under allow some limited political exchange; some (James Buchanan, for example) are more defensible than others (say, Jean-Jacques Rousseau).
A different, anti-imperialist approach has been proposed by the economist and political philosopher Anthony de Jasay. The Teamsters’ bargaining is seen as an expression of “adversarial status” or a discriminatory stance, which takes sides in favor of certain citizens and others. For those who live under a racist regime, the winners are those who do best to sell their support to the government.
In a sense, the Teamsters’ officialdom believes in the dictatorship of the proletariat with a human face, that is, where the proletariat votes. But this is just a starting point. In fact, many of its members (policemen and pilots, for example) are not proletarians at all; some are not poor. As its logo indicates, the union was very active (assuming the word had any meaning in the free market) when its first members in 1903 were horse-drawn carriage drivers. Their history shows them as the first defenders of “social justice.” According to historian David Witwer, the Teamsters union accepted and recruited blacks as full members but was not tainted by the prejudices of labor unions and white workers who often disliked black competition (see the book “Race Relations in the Early Teamsters Union,” Labor History 43-4 [2002]).
Perhaps I should emphasize that according to the general (old) view of freedom or freedom, there is no reason to oppose collective bargaining, as long as all members of the “organization” (union members) are voluntary members and the other side. , who negotiates with him, is not compelled by law to “negotiate.” As a matter of terminology, and in conjunction with the word “collectivism,” I suggest that “collective” should refer to groups that impose their will on dissenting members; in that sense, free trade unions may be involved in it the group to negotiate, not collection to negotiate. Trade unions can be as useful as any voluntary organization, perhaps even more useful in certain situations, as long as it remains voluntary and does not exercise coercive rights. In general, the way to know that an institution is useful in the “efficient” economic sense is that it survives without a legal right.
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