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Comment by thrance | Hacker News Reader

A lot of Americans have been tricked into thinking that worker's rights are a bad thing. The Washington Post, owned by none other than Jeff Bezos, greatly contributed to this sad state of affairs.

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I at least appreciate that Bezos is now transparent with his transactional beliefs, instead of trying to wrap them in some bullshit moral superiority.

During Trump I, WaPo was all "Democracy Dies In Darkness". Trump II is all about "Hey, we don't do presidential endorsements anymore" and "our opinion pages are only about defending personal liberties and free markets".

It does seem like WaPo has become very vanilla, and unwilling to run anything controversial during T 2.0. I switched to the US version of The Guardian, largely due to WaPo's anti-Palestine bias and feeling like I was just being spoon-fed information that wasn't actually useful. I didn't feel like that 2 years ago, but I guess change is a constant.

It's not simply always good or always bad. Sometimes unions get too powerful for the general good of the population. Workers rights come at a cost to non-workers and the general population. Do you really want to ban intermodal shipping containers to protect watersiders' rights to work inefficiently? That's an example of where unions were trying to rent-seek from the rest of the economy. Newspapers had similar problems with their printers and associated workers having probably too much power through their unions. If printer/etc. unions had their way, there'd be no internet news because that "stole" their jobs and their workers rights.

A lot of Americans have also been tricked into thinking that capital is evil and labor is always right no matter what.

Not nearly enough. Too many are still siding with the Bezos and Musks of the world rather than with their coworkers.

I suppose when inequality in the us is not at an all-time high, I will worry about that less.

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