Theme: Class

ON UNIONS

The unions made common mistakes of overreach. They began with the moral: safety, liability, minimum wages, profit sharing, and replacing with cheaper workers (arbitrage). But then proceeded with overreaches that varied from moral hazard: demands for impossible future claims: continuous increases and pensions; then to the immoral: mandatory membership, mandatory fees, and fostering endemic corruption; then to the violation of natural law: interfering in the political process.

It’s a shock to capitalists and free marketers raised on the myth of constant growth made possible under the agrarian and industrial (hydrocarbon) eras, and prohibiting temporal labor arbitrage is perhaps hard for the layman to understand when it occurs across decades of time rather than across national borders, but men are not commodities and their marketability declines rapidly after choice of first opportunity – and seizing all the ‘best’ time at the lowest price under promise of future rewards is merely an act of fraud. So it is all too easy to socialize uncompetitiveness and privatize commons into the hands of investors and capitalists.

Most capitalists cannot compete under free trade because profits would be much smaller. Contrary to libertarian dogma, and contrary to anglo bourgeois values, while the puritan/manorial work ethic is an unquestionable good, and while rule of law assisting in capital concentration and formation is an unquestionable good, as a good Propertarian we query ‘But what are the limits of that good? Because there exist no unlimited theories and therefore no unlimited goods.’ And we find that it is possible to socialize losses and privatize gains if we do not perform full accounting.

And a full accounting only ends when we have reduced all accounts to ‘time’. Because it is ‘time’ that is the currency we trade.