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Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

A union is just the free market at work. Much as a business is a collection of individuals working toward the common goal of supplying a product, a union is a collection of individuals working toward the common goal of supplying a product (labor). If you believe a union is a cartel that squeezes money from consumers, you must necessarily believe that a company is the same thing.

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> A union is just the free market at work.

That's not the case. A union is an organization for extracting rents above those the market would ordinarily bear. Rent-seeking activity --- no matter who does it --- makes society as a whole worse off. Bastiat showed that a long time ago.

When corporations organize to extract rents, we call them cartels and apply strict penalties under the law. Why should employees have a right to use these same tactics? The market for thee, but not for me?

Doesn't the practice of minimum wage and labor rights also allow the worker to "extract rents above those the market would ordinarily bear"? Do those practices make society as a whole worse off?

The libertarian or whatever this person identifies as will claim yes, which kind of goes to show that we should reject these anti-human economic philosophies, never mind the fact that they're economically unsound anyway.

Explain to me why region controls exist on digital products and then let's talk about "extracting rents above what the market would ordinarily bear". This is how markets function, and in our current state of affairs we need to benefit the lives of ordinary people that exist within a completely marketized existence.

> A union is an organization for extracting rents above those the market would ordinarily bear.

The operative word there is "normally", which makes your claim tautalogical. Unions do increase the cost of labor compared to a market without unions, but this is simply relative. You haven't (and I claim that you cannot) provide a reason that the cost of labor without unions is more natural, and isn't simply unnaturally suppressed by an imbalance in market power between job seekers and providers.

> You haven't (and I claim that you cannot) provide a reason that the cost of labor without unions is more natural

I reject the premise of your claim. The market price isn't just one of many prices from which we should choose arbitrarily. The emergent market price is special. It's the privileged result of price discovery via distributed transactions. Every time in history someone tries to conform the market into an unnatural shape using wage and price controls, the result is shortages and other dysfunctions. The burden of proof isn't on me to show that the market price is the natural one: it's on you to show that in the case of labor we shouldn't have a free market.

My point is that unions arise in a free market, so the price with unions is the market price.

You need to show that unions are unnatural before you can claim that they aren't the market price.

Corporations are capitalists performing collective action. Our governments not only allow this, but provide special provisions in the law to support and encourage it.

We can get rid of collective action for workers when we get rid of it for capital. Until then, if anything we need a shift away from enthusiastically encouraging collective capital while barely tolerating collective labor, to something more equitable and beneficial to the individuals whose government suffers those corporations to exist in the first place, whose interests lie overwhelmingly on the side of labor.

A union is a group of people saying pay us more it give us better benefits, otherwise we will go elsewhere. Most of the power is in the employer. A single individual didn't have much power. And it isn't quite the same as choosing to purchase a loaf of bread from a different store. You keep claiming that a union extracts rents above those the market would ordinarily best. But I don't think you've given any evidence that that is the case. This isn't the case where someone thinks that salaries are too low, so they'll open a new business and pay more.

> A union is a group of people saying pay us more it give us better benefits, otherwise we will go elsewhere.

No. A union is a group of people saying "pay us more or we'll shut down your business". That's why unions have traditionally had picket lines and why they've historically used violence against "scabs".

The framing of this is so incredibly (almost humorously) ideological. Look at what you've implicitly set up:

* the State, contracts, corporations, right-to-work law, at-will employment law, etc - all good, natural parts of the market.

* employee unions - bad, unnatural, rent-seeking, deviations from the market.

It's untenable.

Do you have an argument other than that I've called bad things bad? Rent seeking is discouraged in economic policy for a reason (a reason I mentioned above), not because economists dislike how the word "rent" sounds or some other arbitrary reason.

> It's untenable

It's quite tenable.

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