The other day, b_b and I were talking, and he made the point that unionization is a private response to labor market conditions. If anything, those that support a lack of government intervention should prefer unionization and its effects over legislative labor regulations.
Makes sense to me; b_b has been known to have good insights about contract law. However, unions often represent government workers, and they are certainly not above leveraging legislation to gain advantage; perhaps this explains why some laissez-faire types have a dim view of unions.
Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger. The two greatest enemies of free enterprise in the United States, in my opinion, have been, on the one hand, my fellow intellectuals and, on the other hand, the business corporations of this country.
I think that entrenched businesses don't have much of an incentive to be defenders of free enterprise, insofar as their mission changes from bringing a product to market to maintaining the status quo once they reach a stable point in their maturity. It behooves a company, supposing they have the resources, to encourage legislation that not only strengthens their own position, but weakens that of new players. Unions could certainly be accused of the same thing. In fact, I think that is the primary reason that there has been a public backlash against unions in the past few decades. Most people don't have first hand experience as entrepreneurs, but most people do have experience looking for a job. A union can be a giant barrier to entry, and an even bigger barrier to success for certain types of workers (for example, a guy wants to do his best, but is barred by work rules from doing anything but his very specific duty, or a woman wants to move up in the company but is passed over because someone of lesser caliber happens to have more seniority).
Not sure how I feel about all this. If one could get a seat at the table with the founders when they hashed out the architecture for our system, one would urge creating permanent presence for societal sectors orthogonal to the general idealogical partisan mix. (House of commons of the British is not what I am talking about here; just recognizing societal structural realities and addressing them accordingly.)
No man, I'm talking about non-partisan structural symmetries ala 'representative quorums' (which they did put in place as they feared mob rule and direct democracy) that reflect the 'thinking subset of "the people"'. What we have now, instead of the OP notion are the "lobbies" and that is somewhat broken, don't you agree?
Oh, absolutely. We have monied quorums rather than an outlet for thoughtful engagement. The majority of the Supreme Court equates money with speech; however, I honestly doubt this is exactly what they are after. In fact, they have legalized corruption, but in spirit I think they had another goal in mind. IMO they expect that money can be a satisfactory proxy for the value of speech; it's today's landed-gentry exclusion. In a highly improbable future, perhaps those of their mind might be persuaded that channels for productive engagement could suffice far better than a wallet caliper.What we have now, instead of the OP notion are the "lobbies" and that is somewhat broken, don't you agree?