Me:

It’s also not clear that the specifically “socialist” element in statist unionism was any worse, at this point than the nativist, pro-war “state capitalist” element.

Kennedy:

Stalin made it clear enough for me.

Kennedy, I’m no export in labor history, but the general impression that I got is that the Stalinist influence on Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) and the ST&LA (1895-1899) was pretty minimal.

In any case, the “at this point” is a clear reference to the later paragraph in which I distinguish the period in which the dominant force among American state socialists in the labor movement were electioneering Social Democrats, and the later period in which they were Communists in the direct service of Moscow. You can complain that even “social democracy” means a steadily growing and increasingly ravenous State, and that the SDs paved the way for echt Bolshevism in the statist Left, and that’d be fair, but if you’re basing your complaints on the more resolute versions of statism that came after, then it would be just as far to cite Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Tojo as the end result of nativist, war-mongerng state capitalism of the sort practiced by “anti-socialist” statist labor “conservatives.”

Maybe we shouldn’t invest too much in picking sides in spats between warring statists.

REALITY CHECK:

Unionism is based on violence. It’s a criminal activity, which only exists because of the State. This exists in both theory and fact.

The Knights of Labor were founded in 1869, predating the Wagner Act (1935) by six and a half decades. Given that half of organized labor’s history in the United States was carried on without any grant of government recognition or privileges, and in fact in the face of massive police and military violence against organizers, strikers, and people who just happened to be in the wrong crowd at the wrong time, I conclude that your claim that “Unionism … only exists because of the State” is what we colloquially call “making shit up.”

Kennedy: I have no problem in principle with unions in a free market. In historical practice though unions have often tended to be dominated by out and out socialists.

What Holmes said.

Also, you need to distinguish at least three different kinds of socialists within organized labor. Early on, there were the electoral socialists (such as Eugene Debs or the ST&LA), on the one hand, and the anti-statist socialists (such as Benjamin Tucker, the International Working People’s Association, and the Wobblies), on the other. Both of them were considered the radical opposition (from different directions) of the mainline conservative unionism and “state capitalism” endorsed by Gompers and his cronies. But while it’s clear that there are objections from libertarian principle against the social democrats, it’s not nearly so clear that there are against the anarchists. (It’s also not clear that the specifically “socialist” element in statist unionism was any worse, at this point than the nativist, pro-war “state capitalist” element.)

After the Bolshevik conquest of international socialism, and the State colonization of the labor movement through the Wagner Act, the main ideological debate within leadership ended up between “anti-socialist” corporatist union bosses backed by Washington, and communist union bosses backed by Moscow. So much the worse for the labor movement, and the world, but there’s no reason to do these bandits the honor of giving them a monopoly on the names “socialism” or “unions,” any more than the rampant Mussolinism of the owning class over the past 70 years justifies giving them a monopoly on “markets” or “business.”

Andrew Rogers: Then, because they’ve been “forced” to bear the weight of all these “free riders,” they demand the power to extract forced dues from employees who didn’t choose to join the union in the first place.

Unions do not extract forced dues from anybody. You don’t have a natural right to work in open shops. Sorry.

The legal and regulatory structure that legally forces business-owners to negotiate with NLRB-recognized unions is a form of coercion. The legal enforcement of the terms of union shop or closed shop contracts is not. (You might say that there’d be a lot fewer union shops if it weren’t for government intervention. Maybe that’s true and maybe it’s not. But if it is, so what? There’d be a lot fewer HMOs if it weren’t for government intervention, too, but that doesn’t mean that you are forced to patronize an HMO, or that the fees you pay them are “extracted” from you.) The distinction is a matter of some practical importance, since systematic attempts to blank it out are the usual justification for the so-called “right to work” (i.e., anti-union shop) laws that are on the books in many states. Those laws have absolutely no justification from a libertarian standpoint, but anti-union conservatives almost universally trot out phoney libertarian rhetoric about “forcing workers to join unions” in order to justify them.

Michael Giesbrecht: I don’t know of any reason to be pro union even in a free market scenerio where unions have no legal means of using violence to acheive their goals. What service would they provide to their members to justify their dues?

This is frankly silly. You may as well ask what services business or professional associations would provide to their members to justify their (much higher) dues, in a free market scenario where they have no legal means of using violence to achieve their goals. The answer is, all kinds of things; and what things are in question depends in part on the organization you’re thinking of.

Different kinds of unions have historically provided different kinds of services. Coordinating strikes or slow-downs with demands (for better wages and conditions, for more autonomy, or whatever), providing a forum for workers to talk with each other, providing a forum for airing grievances against management, providing representation for the worker’s interests in grievances against management, keeping and publishing information about which employers treat workers well and which treat them poorly (for example, this is one of the primary functions of unions that are uncomfortable with admitting that they’re unions, such as the AAUP), offering venues in which workers can get to know each other and socialize, providing a cooperative organization for services like education or health insurance or funeral benefits or any number of other kinds of mutual aid, providing hiring halls where new workers can find a job, or even serving as a cooperative structure for coordinating direct ownership and management of shops by the workers themselves, have all been stated goals and actual practices of historical labor unions. (Labor unions have often disagreed vigorously with one another over the best ways to achieve this — for example whether to organize by shop, by craft, by industry, or by region; whether to form unions that are racially, nationally, or gender segregated; the level of solidarity to practice with other unions; what kind of goals to set; what kind of dues to charge; how to pick people for positions of executive authority, for how long, under what conditions, and with what powers; whether to actively bargain with employers or just to set demands; who should do the bargaining if bargaining is done; etc. etc. etc. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but whether or not to try to exercise political control through the State in order to achieve demands. Before the Wagner Act gave a massive government subsidy to one particular variety of unionism — conservative AFL-line unionism, focused on collective bargaining for wage and benefit improvements — there were many significant unions, such as the Wobblies, that spurned electioneering and lobbying in principle, and stated explicitly anarchist goals.)

Lopez: The major media’s usual bias is “business bad, unions good”, so I judge it just natural that these types take the opposite tack.

Lopez, I’m familiar with plenty of examples of major media bias against businesses as such, but I can’t think of very many examples of major media bias in favor of unions, at least in the past couple decades or so. (Actually, it’s rare enough to find any mention of unions at all, other than pro sports players’ unions.) What did you have in mind here?

T. J. Madison: Rad Geek, most tyrants seem to do rather badly.

This is certainly true. In fact, I think it’s analytically true that all tyrants do badly, because one of the things that tyrants have to do in their lives is be tyrannical, and living your life by lording it over other people and living off of their honest labor is a pathetic and rotten way to be.

If you mean that tyrants also suffer from psychological or material evils (like anxiety, frustration, loneliness, discontent, material deprivation, etc.) then that is certainly also true more often than a lot of people realize. But given that a life of cannibalism, bullying, and phoney posturing at martial glory is pathetic even if it is pursued in absolute contentment and full of the most exquisite pleasures, that sort of appeal to the external punishments that a life of monstrous vice may, empirically, end up inflicting on you, seems to me to be wholly beside the point.

Stefan: Then on what basis can we condemn Agathocles for slaughtering old men for his personal gain if he was happy with the results, secure in his position, and had successfully repelled Carthage and governed Sicily peacefully for many years before dieing in old age?

The basis on which we can condemn him is pretty obvious: he’s a murderer and a tyrant. (If condemnation, as a social practice, was not made for murderers and tyrants, who was it made for?) You might think, though, that having condemned him, there is still an open question about whether or not we can convict him of being irrational, or give him reasons not to do what he did. I think that you can; they are roughly the reasons that I sketched out in replying to T.J. above. (If you could be absolutely sure that you could get away with murdering a rival and taking all his possessions, would you do so? If not, why not?)

Stefan:

Also, “rain falls on the just and unjust alike”. Many evil autocrats and murderers have also led long, satisfying lives and then died wealthy and with their family as well.

Well, this presupposes that you can give some kind of account of what a “satisfying” life is without making reference to terms like justice, kindness, moderation, etc. If by “satisfying” you mean that they felt pleased with it on reflection, then I’m sure this is true. But if by satisfying you mean something more like a life that meets the criteria for having lived a good life, then it’s not at all clear that it’s true.

If it’s just a matter of felt contentment, then it still may very well be the case that being a tyrant is its own punishment — that it is, as Plato claims, the most miserable kind of life. If it’s a matter of living a life that’s fulfilling in some more objective sense, then it’s not clear that any tyrants have ever enjoyed this.

wade:

I don’t think the free market would have waged a better war against the germans than nation states managed in 1939 – 45.

What do you mean by “a better war against the Germans”? What do you think makes a war effort better, as opposed to worse? And why do you think the war that Stalin’s USSR, the UK, the US, and France fought against Hitler’s Germany, counts as a better war than could have been fought without the involvement of the Allied nation-states?

Holmes is right about the differences between controversial and non-controversial articles, and having dealt with some of the characters who make editing an article such as WikiPedia:Anarcho-capitalism such a tremendous pain in the ass, I think I have some idea why. WikiPedia is based on a surprisingly simple and surprisingly robust consensus process, but consensus processes have problems when faced with belligerent fanatics and self-appointed hall monitors, and controversial articles attract both. (The kind of editing that instant in-place revisions on web content makes easy also encourages certain kinds of incoherent mishmash that accumulate when the hall monitors make several lazy edits that attempt to do away with controversy by piling on endless qualifying phrases.)

As for the complaint that WikiPedia contributors don’t have an incentive to help produce good articles because they don’t make a profit from a good outcome, there are two things that I wish I understood better. (1) First, “profit:” when you assert that WikiPedia contributors don’t have a profit motive, what do you count as “profit”? Does it have to be monetary? (2) What sort of outcomes do you have in mind that would qualify as “good outcomes” for an information source? (Is it a single characteristic, or are there multiple characteristics? If multiple, are there any trade-offs involved?)

I said a while back that, instead of sending Bob Wallace’s columns at LRC down the memory hole, a more honest way to deal with the situation would have been to leave the old columns up, and put up a note to the effect that LRC would no longer be carrying his columns for whatever reasons Lew has for not wanting to carry his columns anymore. Kinsella replied:

Kinsella: “I have seldom read more idiotic comments in my short life.”

The cheap shot reply would be to ask whether these comments were really more idiotic than “Jews will always be ostracized because of their attempts to destroy every culture that admits them.”

The higher ground reply would be to point out that Lew apparently thought that Wallace’s idiocy was embarassing enough to justify no longer carrying his columns. Given that this is the case, I wonder whether Kinsella really thinks that simply erasing the record of the old columns, without comment or explanation, is really the most honest way of dealing with the situation. For myself, I know that I don’t see much to admire in giving your past mistakes that sort of Disappearing Commisar treatment.

Kennedy: “I don’t see how you can criticize LRC for punting Wallace. What reaction would satisfy you?”

Well, punting Wallace is for the best but the memory-hole treatment is not really an appropriate way to deal with embarrassing fascists. A public statement that they’d no longer be carrying Bob Wallace’s columns and the reasons for it would have been more honest.

Stefan: “How is the argument that open borders exacerbate terrorism a bigoted argument? Or the argument that since different groups can never get along, they should be separated in order to make everybody happier? Those don’t seem like bigoted arguments.”

Neither argument for immigration restrictions can succeed except on the presumption that it’s OK to use violent means to control the movement of individual foreigners, without any evidence of actual or threatened wrongdoing, in order to stop some vaguely-specified group of other foreigners from committing or threatening some vaguely-specified wrongdoing. That seems pretty bigoted to me. (It also usually requires some further forms of bigotry — e.g. the baseless idea that foreigners, as such, pose any greater threat to your safety than God-fearing Americans, or the similarly baseless idea that you can do whatever you like to innocent individual people in order to safeguard the Volkisch purity of your neighborhood. But even without these further premises, the position itself requires bigotry to justify itself.)

But Lopez is right to point out that he specifically mentioned racism, not bigotry at large. The reasons you cited are examples of reasons that are bigoted but not racist.