Posted on 09/29/2012 8:20:03 AM PDT by TurboZamboni
Many Americans start from the premise that in any dispute between organized labor and management, labor should win. Yet it's hard to see why. We don't assume one party is virtuous and the other wicked when two parties are bickering over the price of a car on Craigslist.
Labor fights are fights over more for me, less for you. They aren't (usually) battles of right and wrong.
Bad laws beget bad laws, and that's been another feature of U.S. labor relations. The 1935 Wagner Act strips one party, employers, of the right not to bargain.
Begotten by this bad law ...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The NFL situation effectively ended this past week the moment that Las Vegas casino began offering refunds to gamblers who lost money on the Seahawks-Packers game. That decision carried an implicit recognition on the part of that casino that an NFL game was no longer a truly competitive event subject to wagering. Once that happened, the writing was on the wall for the NFL and they had no choice but to bring back the real officials.
The GOP, supposedly the party of free enterprise, has historically been willing to regard the goals of big business as being equivalent to the interests of capitalists. I think this started during the Vietnam War. Prior to the War, the GOP was generally the party of liberty. Leaders of the GOP included such people as Robert Taft, Howard Buffett, and Clare Boothe Luce. But support for the War was less a policy position than a cultural position. There were right-wing groups that opposed the War, such as the JBS, but they were a tiny minority.
Support for the War drove the GOP into the hands of corporate- that is, corporatist - leaders. Nixon is often characterized as “liberal” given his founding of the EPA, advocacy of the Health Maintenance Act of 1974, wage and price controls, and ending the Bretton Woods agreement by taking the US off the gold standard. However, I think it’s more accurate to say that Nixon represented the high point of corporatism, until Barack Obama came along, that is.
Obama contends that he has listened to the investor class, when he has simply solicited the opinions of Warren Buffett and Jeffrey Immelt. He supposedly included the needs of the private sector in ObamaCare, because he cut a deal with the big pharma companies, device makers, and “private” health insurers. GM and Chrysler are still ostensibly “private” companies.
The problem is, most of the GOP is only slightly more friendly to true economic liberty.
As a result, the concept of economic liberty is foreign to most Americans.
For an example of liberal corporatism, there was recently passed an initiative in WA state that allows big box stores to sell spirits. It was passed by the voters handily.
The biggest sponsor? Costco, who stands to make millions from this.
When Obama was recently in the state? Guess who's house he went to for a fundraiser? The owner of...Costco.
A huge liberal billionaire.
It was actually funny seeing the ads against this. Liberals fighting for the unionized state run stores against the liberal evil big corporation Costco.
The people ended up stumbling on the right answer, but it was a hard fought battle.
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