Originally Posted by
Sam Ting Wong
Cxorcist, I know you believe you saw all that coming. Let's assume you are right for a brief moment. Doesn't that make you the greatest fool of all? I mean, you knew this would happen, right? But you are still here, with a green card in your hand, next to all those marxist, non-believer, incompetent low-hour cadets on the same ridiculous payscale as you.
Slasher, now that you see what pure market forces unleashed can do, how is your libertarian world view coming along these days? Still a fan? What is happening right now would cream Ayn Rands panties, the invisible hand at full swing. You must be overjoyed.
Actually they're not inconsistent; at least as far as the late Oliver Wendell Holmes would have said. The key being that the group has to have unity; something we've always lacked. Perhaps some have THOUGHT we've had it, but at the end of the day it's always been everyone for themselves to the detriment of everyone at this place. To wit:
"If it be true that workingmen may combine with a view, among other things, to getting as much as they can for their labor, just as capital may combine with a view to getting the greatest possible return, it must be true that, when combined, they have the same liberty that combined capital has, to support their interests by argument, persuasion, and the bestowal or refusal of those advantages which they otherwise lawfully control."
He would be the dissenting opinion on that case; it later being reversed (so these unions started off with even the law against them). In a day when unions made significant gains by sticking together while facing REAL adversity and the deck stacked against them. And their real adversity involved immediate job losses, private police forces shooting and beating them up, and strikebreakers with axe handles. Hardly the pen and ink world you've ever faced.
Of note is that Jimmy Hoffa organized a (successful) strike in the middle of the Great Depression where any job was hard to come by and easily replaced. Management quickly settled. If you're looking for adversity that time period had real adversity; not some country club esoterics.