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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

It's not nearly as symmetric as you're making it out to be.

In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner. This is from just basic diminishing marginal utility of the dollar.

Of course, unions can do awful, evil things - they are organizations of people and people are petty, self-centered, greedy, etc.

I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is). I'm not unaware that sometimes those workers can elect bad people.

I'm also in favor of electoral democracy, even if I wouldn't personally defend every single person who has been elected president since the start of time.

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You completely ignored his point. It's not about who's pockets the dollars wind up in. It's about not permitting groups to harm everyone else.

Or rather, you completely ignored the second half of my comment :)

To reiterate, I would support voters being able to decide military policy, even if the alternative was a peaceful oligarchy.

And you double down.

Your second paragraph adds nothing except detailing your reasoning which only serves to exemplify the behavior the comment you are replying to is complaining about. The point of the comment you are replying to is that people have a bad tendency to ignore groups doing evil things for their own gains if they otherwise align with these groups.

Whether it's the moron on one side of the isle screeching about "mUh UnIoNs" or the moron on the other side of the isle screeching about "mUh SmAlL bUsInEsSeS" is irrelevant. People, you very much included, need to refrain from giving groups on "their side" a blank check to engage in evil self serving behavior at everyone else's expense.

Of course the evil to good ratio is not the same for any two groups or groups of groups. His entire point was that that liking one group more than another is a worthless excuse for turning a blind eye to that group's evil. Just because you are able to write a second (or 3rd or 4th) paragraph expanding about why you feel one group deserves a blind eye more than another only serves to illustrate his point.

Your behavior is exactly what he is complaining about.

Civil rhetoric really breaks down when it comes to politics, it seems.

Nobody in this thread was "screeching" about anything, and I don't appreciate being not-so-subtly called a moron. I have done nothing of the same to you.

I am perfectly capable of criticizing bad actions by unions, 2020 has had a number of them.

But I will not use those critiques as an excuse to argue that the right to elect someone to negotiate on your behalf should be curtailed, because I believe the right to worker self-determination comes prior to those consequences - just as I don't support banning "bad" speech even if that speech has consequences.

I'm not going to keep responding because, honestly, you seem to be shadow-boxing a conversational opponent who only exists in your own mind.

> In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner. This is from just basic diminishing marginal utility of the dollar.

Remarkably few people seem to truly understand what "marginal propensity to consume" actually means.

Economically, money saved is money lost. Money invested is a promise of debt. Consumption is what drives the economy. That's why the poor and middle class are so important. Without them having enough money, the economics of scale... don't scale.

I'll admit while I'm inclined to believe that it's better to distribute money to workers rather than investors, I don't understand the economic mechanics that makes this true.

I do understand that the rich aren't gong to spend as much as the middle and lower classes, but I don't have a good answer for the predictable trickle-down rebuttal: the wealthy will invest rather than spend, and that investment funds jobs which put money in the pockets of the poor (but perhaps more so in the pockets of the rich?). You sort of touch on that: "consumption is what drives the economy", but I think the trickle-down economics folks would agree and argue that their job-creation-via-investment results in increased consumption? I have a headache.

The difference between investment and spending is whether you have more or less money afterwards.

> I'll admit while I'm inclined to believe that it's better to distribute money to workers rather than investors, I don't understand the economic mechanics that makes this true.

It's probably more true now than during most of history, but it's not always true.

It probably was true in the Reagan era that trickle-down "worked", because there was a lot of opportunity for large scale capital investment to improve the economy and make things people wanted (and provide jobs in the process). That doesn't seem as true now. Investors already have an excess amount of capital they don't know what to do with (and so are just doing things like buying houses en masse).

Consumption also funds jobs which put money in the pockets of the poor.

It has the added benefit of bidding up the price of things poor people need, which yes is inflationary but also incentivizes more resources being provisioned to help provide the things that poor people need.

I think OP made a correct argument that that we quickly make this right vs left without dissecting the actual impacts of workers unions. Your comment kind of demonstrates that.

> In terms of overall welfare

What is overall welfare ? If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes. If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.

> I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is).

I do not think anyone is opposed to that idea. It is covered under our freedom to form association. But in many cases unions are exact opposite of this. There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf. In such cases workers are less free than before and it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders. (This is what happens in every single society where unions have collective bargaining rights.)

> If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes.

Who's “we”? I was under the impression that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure was accurate.

Market failure is applicable only in limited cases to the extent that it matters. Employment in this case is not one of those.

So how do you explain… *gestures around* ?

Employment is one of the most obvious, salient examples of market failure I can think of. Exploitative employers engineer situations where employees can't even use the job market, because they need a job and job-shopping (e.g. taking time off-call to do interviews) will lose them their job. Example: Arise Virtual Solutions[0].

If that's not a good enough example? See the gig economy. Companies taking over a service sector “with an app”, at a loss (using investor money), then squeezing the money back out of employees (e.g. by misclassifying them, not telling them how much each gig pays, programming virtual micromanagers to work them to the point of health problems in the name of “efficiency”). To use your words:

> If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.

[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#ari...

> If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes.

It's easy to find lump sum transfers that would be welfare enhancing over the pareto optimal outcome decided by the market.

> There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf.

Well yes, you are beholden to the results of the election - even if the side you voted for didn't win. That is what worker self-determination is all about.

> it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders

Then why don't employers bring in unions more often?

Doesn’t have to be one bad person… a union as you say is still self-centered. Since they are an effective monopoly on workers, they can get pretty powerful and thus one-sided in interest seeking.

> In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner.

Maybe, but printing a dollar and giving it to a union worker causes worse inflation than printing a dollar and giving it to an owner.

Nobody said anything about printing.

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