You can really be a cynical asshole, I approve but Al has made a very good point. Without unions there would be no labor laws in this country.
Originally Posted by: DakotaT
And without...
1. Without Magna Carta, there would have been no check on the king. Does that mean we should go back to dukes, barons, and the like?
2. Without the Industrial Revolution, there would have been no modern economic growth. Does that mean we should go back to the ways of cholera, child labor, and Flo Nightingale?
3. Without the Wright brothers, we wouldn't be able to fly. Does that mean we should protect the makers of propeller airplanes from those who make jets?
4. Without corporate entities like the Virginia Company, The Massachusetts Bay Company, and the Hudson Bay Company, beneficiaries of government grants of monopoly all, almost none of us would be here. Does that mean we should protect Corporate America from the wrath of the American people?
5. Without copyright law, we would not have had the protection of those who create things by words and expression. Does that mean we should support the RIAA and whatever DRMA (sp?) Act comes next?
6. Without Genghis Khan building the largest land-based empire the world has ever seen, we'd still be fighting everything like the Game of Thrones. Does that mean we should take the Mongols' approach to politics?
7. Without the British building the largest ocean-based empire the world has ever seen, those occupying places would never seen the example of "the rights of free-born Englishmen" and been able to draft the Declarations of Independence and modern Constitutions a big chunk of the world lives by today? Should we return to the rules of the East India Company?
8. Without slavery, sugar would never have made its way across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Should we go back to it?
9. Without medieval guilds, we would never have developed the apprenticeship methods that allowed masters of a craft to build upon their predecessors for generation after generation. Should we go back to those times, when a bunch of guys in funny robes controlled who entered and who didn't enter into fields of trade?
10. Without the one-room schools, the crossing of the American frontier would not have been accompanied by a growth of literacy but by a decline. Should we go back to them.
Sorry, DakotaT, the logic of "without unions, there would be no ...", however popular it might be with you and others, is simply fallacious reasoning. Human history is full of economic institutions that weren't just valuable but necessary to human progress that have little remaining value. The industrial union, so necessary in an industrial world trying to cope with yet sustain a multiple-generation process of paradigmatic technological change, is an impediment to improvement in an information world trying to cope with and sustain a process of multiple paradigm shifts within a single generation.
Without the modern container ship, and its capacity for carrying hundreds of thousands of cargo at a time, and for being loaded or unloaded in less than a single day, the modern economy would screech to a halt faster than you and vikesrule can call each other assholes.
And do you know what the absolutely essential requirement for that container shipping industry's existence was and is: the destruction of a way of life for (heavily unionized) longshoremen and warehousemen of the prior era. Want to know why Hollywood can find all those abandoned warehouses everywhere for its gritty action flicks? Because the container ship means you don't need warehouses to keep things out of the rain and away from thieves for days while those amazingly skilled longshoremen figured out how to put tens of thousands of boxes, crates, barrels, bundles, and other differently shaped 3D-jigsaw pieces into the hull into the nooks and crannies of an typical ship.
Those same longshoremen who made it possible to get all that materiel to the Allies and to shipbuilders after Pearl Harbor, without which D-Day, VE-day, or VJ-day would have been impossible.
But, unfortunately for us, those longshoremen and their unions also retained power to frustrate the application of already-existing technology until the Vietnam War, and so much of the amazing growth that might have been possible 20 or 30 years earlier (the growth that you and I have enjoyed for our entire adult lives) would have been available before the Korean War.
Every important economic institution contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. The more we advance, the more we need to develop new institutions. The more important a particular institution was to getting us where we are, the more we need to be willing to abandon it in favor of something better and more appropriate.
Unions were necessary. Their accomplishments should be celebrated, just as we Packer fans should celebrate the championships that make the Packers the greatest team in the history of football.
But if the Packers want to continue to get those championships in the future, they cannot get caught up in trying to re-enact the past. The NFL, and the needs of champions, have changed.
I wish it weren't so. But it is.
IMO, what makes our current president so bad isn't that he's a liberal and a statist (though he is both, and neither is a good thing). It's not even that he's a urban politician in the dubious tradition of Tammany Hall and people named Daley, though he is that, too. IMO, what makes his opponent so bad isn't that he's a right-winger and a statist (though he is both, and neither is a good thing). It's not even that he's a conservative in the dubious tradition of moralists like Brigham Young and Andrew Carnegie. What's wrong with Obama and Romney isn't even that they are cynical manipulators in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller and Robert Byrd, people who would make Machiavelli puke, though IMO they both are that, too.
No, what make them particularly bad for us is that they can't or won't distinguish between the past and the future. Like so many, they look back to the "better times". The times of Keynes and Dewey, of Samuel Gompers and Joseph Ryan, for Obama. The times of Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan, of J. P. Morgan and Arthur Burns, for Romney.
This is not surprising. They're both boomers. The first generation for which things were dumbed down. They're the spoiled affluent kids of a generation whose parents gave us Dick and Jane and "See Spot run," Ozzie and Harriet, American Bandstand, suburbs, and Gore Vidal, and passed them off as the pinnacle of "American culture".
Unions and corporations -- their time has come and gone. Abolish them both.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)