Great. What better way to honor the life and accomplishments of a libertarian intellectual than by picking an arbitrary date for tax-raising, universal-insurance-mandating government windbags to sing his praises and talk about his influence?

Constant,

The I.W.W. was founded in 1905. Its membership peaked in the early 1920s at about 100,000 workers. During the first couple decades of its existence its most numerous constituents were timber workers and miners in the American West. You may think that the logging towns and mining camps of the 1900s-1920s were hotbeds of “left-wing intellectuals” playing at working-class solidarity, but you can hardly expect most people to agree with you.

You may note that it also predated the Communist Party U.S.A. by about a decade and a half. The economic ideas they promoted were generally not communist, but rather syndicalist. The immigrant members who were deported to Russia after the Palmer Raids usually found themselves jailed, exiled, or shot.

The membership of the I.W.W. today is about 1% of what it was in the early 1920s, and due to the impact of the Wagner Act and similar measures most workers find it more advantageous to join conservative, NLRB-recognized unions. However, I’d suggest that a balanced view of the IWW’s role in labor history would require looking back a bit further than 2007 and it would also require a bit more detailed of a discussion than you’ll find from a WikiPedia article.

Brandon,

What I’m suggesting is that different unions have different organizing models just as different firms have different business models. Excluding politically, economically, or culturally vulnerable segments of the labor market from your organizing is a model that some of them have adopted, but others adopted a model of trying to organize all workers everywhere to the extent that they could. The exclusionist organizing model is usually unstable in a free market, because unions depend on membership to get anything done, and excluding large segments of the working population creates an entrepreneurial opportunity for inclusive unions to pick up membership.

I think the fragility of their position is part of the reason why conservative union bosses actively aided the government in its efforts to violently suppress the radicals. The government in turn liked and supported the conservative unions because they drew workers away from radical unions, which during the 1900s-1920s tended to be more or less explicitly anarchist.

Aaron,

I doubt she’d be surprised. What she expresses in her article about the role of male-dominated unions in excluding women and marginalizing their concerns is not surprise, but rather anger. In any case, there is a very similar history within the AFL (the “American Separation of Labor,” as A. Philip Randolph liked to say) and its role in propping up Jim Crow in the American South. As well as the long history of nativism and anti-immigrant politics throughout the history of the AFL.

Half Sigma,

Neither all workers, nor all unionized workers, are men. Do everyone a favor and get Sam Gompers out of your head before you start thinking about the characteristics of the labor movement broadly.

Dave,

SDS isn’t a union. It’s a student organization. (That’s what the first “S” is for.)

Making more money is not the primary goal of joining a union—any kind of union. The primary goal is for workers to gain more autonomous power in the workplace. One way such power can be exercised is by bargaining for higher wages. (Most conservative unions today use it to bargain for job security and generous benefits for senior employees, more than for higher wages.) But there are lots of other ways that workers might exercise it.

And I don’t care what kind of unions conservatives can live with. I am a free marketeer, not a conservative. Thus I prefer anti-statist radical unions to establishmentarian conservative unions that have spent the past 70 years selling out workers in the name of maintaining their positions of influence within the liberal corporate state.

Brandon,

I guess that explains why radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World made active efforts to organize all workers, and fiercely criticized folks like the American Separation of Labor for their exclusionist organizing models, right?

Or perhaps not all unions are actively described by an economic model that was designed to explain the behavior of one specific tendency within a labor movement that used to be very diverse and used to have very vigorous internal debates over tactics, strategy, vision, etc. before the government got involved.

In a free market, exclusionist unions create market opportunities for their own competitors. One source of competition is the non-unionized labor market. But another source of competition is more inclusive unions which have goals other than shoring up the collective bargaining power of the aristocracy of labor. Thus the active alliance between big business, big government, and the establishment labor unions to destroy the IWW and similar unions, especially during crises such as World War I. Sometimes by passing extensive labor regulations that favor conservative, centralized unions; sometimes by sending out the goon squad to shoot or deport them.

As far as unions acting against their own interests goes, I expect what she’s referring to is the fact that when unions act to benefit one limited sector of the working class, at the expense of the rest of the working class, they undermine the long-term interests of all workers, including their own. The idea is that short-term gains are usually bought at the expense of destroying potential allies and making the fortunes of the union dependent on appeasing the powers that be. Since destroying potential allies strengthens the hand of your establishment patrons, it’s likely that eventually they will decide they don’t need you any more.

Judging what’s happened lately to big establishment unions (take the UAW—please!) over the past 40 years or so, I’d say that that claim is probably well-supported by the empirical evidence.

Dave_D:

If it were up to me I would legalize, regulate and tax all drugs.

I was right with you up until “regulate and tax.”

Why the hell would you bollix up a good thing like repeal by turning around and re-instituting prohibition against any recreational drug-dealers or drug-users who haven’t (1) paid tribute to the federal government or (2) properly begged the FDA for a permission slip?

Brandon,

Less destructive forms of robbery are preferable to more destructive forms, but they are not more “fair.” Fairness is not a virtue that applies to the selection of victims for aggression. Whether or not some new tax scheme would be less destructive than the existing one is, dignifying it as more “fair” obscures the issue and gives moral credit where none is due.

nelziq:

If anything, it is more fair to consider progressivity with relation to consumption rather than income….

There is no fair way to pick and choose victims for robbery.

The only way to fix it is to stop doing it.

You know why I hate progressive income taxes?

Because they take my hard-earned money from me against my will, and then put it to use in projects I never agreed to, many of which I find morally abhorrent.

Good thing a national sales tax will solve that problem, eh?

Allen:

I think the key to judging the actions of the officer at the library is what if any training, instructions and guidelines they’ve received in regards to user not only the taser but in how to best deal with situations like this.

Why?

What sort of “training” do you think they’d need to understand that it’s not O.K. to torture a man who is already lying on the ground handcuffed with repeated electrical shocks?

I have no problem with looking at the problems that pervade the institutional culture of the UCPD, as far up the chain of command as you need to go. But I’ll be damned if The “Abu Ghraib” Defense is going to put me off holding these hired goons individually accountable for their actions.

Peter,

Do you think that it’s appropriate for police to respond to a violation of computer lab usage rules by torturing the rule-breaker with repeated electric shocks while he is lying helpless on the ground (including several shocks after he was already handcuffed), and while he offers no threat to anyone at all?

If so, you’re a fucking sociopath. Next.

Constant,

Partial deregulation can be economically disastrous.

Sure. For example, dumping existing healthcare subsidies for poor people and old people while keeping government-enforced monopoly pricing on drugs would be pretty crappy for the poor people and old people. (Generally speaking almost every government intervention has some countervailing intervention that’s intended to mop up after the mess it leaves. And we’ve got to repeal something or another at some point if we hope to repeal everything some day.) But anyway, like you I favor freedom regardless of economic consequences; I reject the idea that an injustice against anyone can be justified or excused by the fact that somebody else gets good results from it.

But while we’re on the subject of the economic consequences, we should keep in mind that the “disaster” being contemplated in the case of pharmaceutical R&D amounts to us being no worse off than we are now (not having new drugs on the market doesn’t mean that the old drugs will disappear). In fact we’d be better off, since all the drugs that are held at artificially high prices today through patent restrictions would eventually become available as generics. The putative harm consists in supposedly not being as much better off as we would have been if the inflated prices had been kept in place.

Even if that’s true it’s pretty weak for a “disaster,” and anyway I can’t see how anyone would even know whether it’s true or not without first managing to do socialist calculation of the most efficient levels of new drugs to have available 20 or 40 years from now (bearing in mind the necessary opportunity cost in other fields of research or production). Since socialist calculation is impossible, I don’t take the argument very seriously.