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Comment by econ4all | Hacker News Reader

The costs of healthcare and housing are far and away the largest dampers on the economy and the cause of inequality.

Shareholder accountability might be something worth looking at but it also seems like a distraction for politicians who are incapable of tackling the real issues.

Dear leftist politicians: please don't attack successful companies and sectors and stop stoking the populist fervor of your hippy base and proto-socialist newcomers and tackle the real issues of healthcare and housing costs which have proven market based solutions.

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As Union membership rises, inequality declines. Worker representation is exactly what's needed. Don't ever say worker representation isn't a "real issue" because it sure is. The 'successful company' is likely successful in your viewpoint because the profits never went to the WORKERS who did ALL OF THE WORK.

https://www.epi.org/news/union-membership-declines-inequalit...

The more money is spent on healthcare and housing the less people have for everything else thus exasperating inequality.

Labor unions hamper corporate options and flexibility and hopefully soon they will all be replaced by machines maybe that would finally make it clear to marxists how much of a commodity labor really is.

>The more money is spent on healthcare and housing the less people have for everything else thus exasperating inequality.

Sure, I'm not going to disagree there.

>Labor unions hamper corporate options and flexibility

So? They no longer will have the option to screw over their workers with low wages and high cost benefits and I think that's an absolute win for the lower 80-90% of the country.

Companies should have all the flexibility to restructure in order to survive tough times or pivot to follow breakthroughs otherwise all these workers won't have a job.

This is not really a great argument as it assumes workers would willingly internally vote away their own jobs, and that's likely to not happen. Nobody wants to be unemployed.

They would stand in the way of every layoff and changes they don't like, that's their mandate, unions are just another entity fighting for the status quo and another hoop a company needs to jump through.

If the costs for major expenditures were lower people will have more resources to climb the socioeconomic ladder, and we won't need to decrease the dynamism of the labor market and saddle corporations with more obligations to achieve that.

Oh and companies shouldn't pay for employee healthcare, that's a WW2 relic that only benefits health insurers by keeping costs high.

>They would stand in the way of every layoff and changes they don't like, that's their mandate, unions are just another entity fighting for the status quo and another hoop a company needs to jump through.

Good, the workers make literally all of the profit and without them the company would cease to exist or make any money. It's a hoop they should have to jump through. The system we have now is maintaining the status quo, so I think you have that backwards.

GOTO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17766831

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