"The best ideas" is a pretty unclear phrase. The ideas that make the individual lives of managers the best will win. That's usually strongly correlated with pro

"The best ideas" is a pretty unclear phrase. The ideas that make the individual lives of managers the best will win. That's usually strongly correlated with profit for the company (on purpose, using mechanisms like stock grants). Depending on how things are structured, it may or may not be correlated with long-term profit for the company. And it's very likely to be poorly correlated with long-term happiness of workers. As a worker, an idea that increases my long-term happiness is "better" than one that increases the company's profitability. But that same idea is unlikely to appear "best" from management's point of view. You can quantify the cost to the company (and thus to the personal payout of management) from giving all workers a raise of X% or an office with a door instead instead of an open-plan desk or increased PTO or whatever, and it's harder to quantify the benefit to profitability. But in the end, the "best" ideas in the sense of the most profitable ones will still win, because companies with truly bad ideas from populism (e.g., "empty the company's cash reserves into end-of-year bonuses") will just not survive. Unions don't change the fact that companies themselves participate in a market. And if you prefer that system, you and others who agree with you can absolutely participate in the market too and compete as part of your own business. You can choose not to join unionized companies. But I don't prefer that system. That's all.