OK, that headline is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but imagine if a company locked-out employees, or customers, as a negotiating tactic the week before Christmas. How many Grinch analogies and metaphors would their be? But as unions go on strike they get a pass because they represent the little guy, if not the lumpenproletariat. They average $25 an hour, pretty modest it sounds. But, they also pay nothing for health care, a price point sure to induce overspending. They also have full pensions starting at age 55, in a day when people expect to live well into their seventies. It sounds comparable to Delphi, where the workers earned about $25 an hour in wages, but cost about $22 an hour in legacy costs (pensions, health care for retirees), and a final $28 an hourn for benefits such as health care and vacation days. So in other words, they probably cost the city $75 an hour, for semi and unskilled labor.
Unfortunately, if you are an unskilled laborer and would like one of their jobs (you probably make only $12 an hour in the US), you are out of luck, so it's really just a great deal for an entrenched set of "little" guys. Further, they go out of their way to stifle competition of all sorts, such as private commuter vans and non-MTA bus lines. The benefits of syndicalism are tolerable if they encompass a small enough portion of society, but little state-sanctioned monopolies run by employees do not scale well within the economy. It's just intrinsically antithetical to productivity improvements, which in the long run, is why our material comforts are so much greater than our grandparents.
HedgeFundGuy - am 2005-12-20 18:24
Captain N (guest) meinte am 20. Dec, 18:44:
I wonder what do you think of this ...
For not having found a better place to post a question I'm doing it here.It would be interesting to know what your opinion is on this:
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm
Thank you before hand. I will be checkign back.
HedgeFundGuy antwortete am 20. Dec, 19:42:
Invisible Hand isn't a cliche, it's a theory
The proposition that individuals, by selfishly responding to price incentives, create the greatest good, is deeply counterintuitive. Einstein, like many other smart, but economically ignorant writers, noted that "production for use" is obviously better than "production for profit", and legions of college students think that getting rid of profits would simply lower costs, and create a better focus on serving people rather than profits. The problem as Hayek pointed out, is that only a price rationing system in a free economy (ie, without government-mandated restraints of free exchange such as quotas, unions that demand a closed shop, etc) incents the right people, at the right time, to make the right decisions. The alternative is a political clusterfluck, as interests wrestle for turf over a perceived fixed economic pie. Hayek mentions Einstein specifically in his Fatal Conceit about this common misperception.
