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> A union is an organization for extracting rents above those the market would ordinarily bear. The operative word there is "normally", which makes your claim
by joshuamorton 7y ago
> A union is an organization for extracting rents above those the market would ordinarily bear.
The operative word there is "normally", which makes your claim tautalogical. Unions do increase the cost of labor compared to a market without unions, but this is simply relative. You haven't (and I claim that you cannot) provide a reason that the cost of labor without unions is more natural, and isn't simply unnaturally suppressed by an imbalance in market power between job seekers and providers.
- quotemstr 7y ago> You haven't (and I claim that you cannot) provide a reason that the cost of labor without unions is more natural I reject the premise of your claim. The market price isn't just one of many prices from which we should choose arbitrarily. The emergent market price is special. It's the privileged result of price discovery via distributed transactions. Every time in history someone tries to conform the market into an unnatural shape using wage and price controls, the result is shortages and other dysfunctions. The burden of proof isn't on me to show that the market price is the natural one: it's on you to show that in the case of labor we shouldn't have a free market.
- joshuamorton 7y agoMy point is that unions arise in a free market, so the price with unions is the market price. You need to show that unions are unnatural before you can claim that they aren't the market price.