what if the choice is unions or government?

One of the reasons I tend to be surprised by the level of anti-union sentiment among economic conservatives is that I see unionism as a natural, and private, alternative to the kind of regulatory and social services creep that conservatives dislike.

I understand that, in a perfect world for economic conservatives, there would be neither unions nor many workplace regulations nor the kind of social programs that liberals favor. It seems to me, though, that after a rather demoralizing series of electoral losses, it perhaps is not the time for triumphalism among economic conservatives. I know these things can turn on a dime. But to me the most salient and important aspect of the various election postmortems was the sense in which Americans have had enough of bootstrapping rhetoric. The congressional elections, I feel, are actually a more telling and important indicator of the national mood than the presidential election, and to me, the most obvious message sent was that Americans were looking for more from government. I'm not good on predictions, but it does seem to me that this is part of a long national shift in the way we view government, not a fickle and brief burst of political anger. Republican politicians now sound like moderate Dems from even 10 or 12 years ago; they seem to know that appeals to gumption or can-doism simply aren't cutting it anymore.

If you're an economic conservative, of course, you should be unhappy about the seeming likelihood of increased government intervention and government spending. Universal health care, of one form or another, looks more likely than not, for the first time in my lifetime. That's the perfect example of a service that, for complicated reasons, is not being provided by the shibboleth of the free market. Americans, feeling the effects of that, turn to government to provide health care. The consequences of such a thing, the wisdom of it, what it says about our evolving national character-- all are open questions, and they have been debated endlessly. What seems clear to me, though, is that this is what is happening. For a conservative, that notion that needs not filled by the market should be provided by government is frightening. I can't argue, though, that this is not a notion that has entered the public consciousness. But what if there was an alternative, another way to at once provide the necessary social and regulatory structures that working Americans need, without turning to government?

To me, that alternative is unions. Say whatever you want about unions-- that they're inefficient, that they're slow to evolve, that they are an affront to free market principles-- they are private entities. They are not wings of the government. And they are a way for working Americans to get a hold of the kind of social guarantees that they are demanding without turning to the coercive legal force of government. Are unions coercive? Sure, in a sense. But they're no more coercive than any other contractual obligation, and surely no more coercive than the coercion of being employed. There's a strange meme around that, while the unions can take or leave whatever the management puts out there, the managements of companies, such as the Detroit automakers, are forced to sign contracts, while unions could walk away from them with no negative consequences, free to go and work in, I don't know, the land of Honah Lee. Yes, not being able to hire anyone to work at your business is a detriment to any corporation. Not being able to have a job and feed your family is a detriment to any worker. Workers and business need each other; unions are the vehicle of workers to leverage that need, just as incorporation is a vehicle for business. It's a mark of our strange national conversation that at a time when corporate power is as entrenched and politically connected as it ever has been, and unions as small and beleaguered as they have been since the dawn of the American labor movement, so many talk about the big, powerful unions and the supposedly meek and retiring corporations.

Whatever else is true, it's the case that the coercion of unions is dwarfed by the coercive power of the government. More and more often, the same services and regulations that have been fought for by the American labor movement-- a movement celebrated around the world, by the way, if not here-- have become codified into law. Many people have decreed that unions are no longer necessary because the law has come to provide the things unions were started to ensure-- a system for capping working hours or for better compensating for hours beyond a certain point, safety and environmental regulations for providing for the health of workers, unemployment and severance benefits, retirement packages, and it seems likely in the near future, health insurance. This has always seemed strange to me, to punish unions for their own success. But it is true that many of the services brought to us by unions have found their way into law. Is this a victory, though? Certainly not for a conservative. Rather than the result of an agreement between workers and employers, these things are now decreed by government. People love to point out the gradual erosion of the number of union workers in the United States. They fail to point out that the benefits of unions have been replaced by government intervention.

This isn't a happy change for conservatives. However coercive or impure the negotiations between business and union, they are negotiations, and there is at the heart of them principles of economic freedom. When law is made to supersede those kinds of arrangements, any notion of bargaining and deal-making are lost. That's not a big problem for me, I guess, but if you're a libertarian, it should be for you. Things change. I suppose it is possible that we will regress to a society less likely to provide certain benefits and regulations that workers demand. But that seems completely out of the character of the national mood, and contrary to recent political history, or the movement of American political history as a whole. Now just doesn't seem like the time for economic conservative triumphalism, with no allowances for the guarantees workers want at all. Sticking to that line seems to me to be a way for economic conservatives to consign themselves to irrelevancy. If these kinds of demands are going to be provided, isn't it for better for conservatives that they be provided by unions instead of by government fiat?

It just seems to me that an awful lot of conservatives are cheering the slow destruction of American unions while a vast architecture of government regulation and social programs is being built in their place, which conservatives should like much less. It's odd to me.