You really have drunk the Kool Aide, haven't  you?  Or maybe just too many Bru-skies?

Bruschi, I'm not trying to spam up the board here (which is why I consolidated links). I'm also not trying to get a point across to let people know how I feel about this. That was already well known here before Walker was elected.

What I am doing is trying to show the shere size and complexity of these events. It is utterly staggering, and has nation-wide consequences.

Oh well, the lefties here will accept any lie that Willy tells, as long as said lie goes along with their preexisting biases.

And I suppose you've never seen Tea Partiers carrying posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache.  Or never heard the Congressman shout "You lie" during the State of the Union speech.  But you cry foul when a sign (an accurate one, too) is held up about Bill O"Reilly?  Can you spell "double standard?"

-- Modified on 2/28/2011 10:48:23 AM

That's all well and good but unions don't, by themselves, inordinately raise their compensation.  It requires a state government to roll over.  Also, many state unions don't have the legal right to strike, which is the most potent weapon they have.  Look what happened when Bloomberg (sort of a Republican) stood up to the Sanitation Workers Union.  They went out on strike.  The public turned their backs on the union.  The courts imposed huge fines which nearly bankrupted the unions.  They caved and came back to work.

willy: You clearly do not pay attention to what other people actually say.

Yes, unions do raise wages of their own members. I said that myself in the second sentence of the first paragraph of my first message in this thread. "They increase the wages of their own workers at the expense of all other workers." THAT'S THE POINT! They raise their own MONEY wages at the expense of all other workers.

MONEY wages are determined by supply and demand, and maybe partly by bargaining power, but REAL WAGES are determined by productivity.

Real wages are what workers can buy with the money they make. That is determined by how productive the economy is, and how that increases the supply of goods that the workers want to buy. And higher productivity means a lower cost of production for all those goods, resulting in lower prices.

What too-powerful unions do is raise the money wages of their own members so those union members can buy up more of the goods and services, bidding up the prices, so non-union workers lower wages buy even less. If by some miracle non-union wages increase as much as union wages, that just means all the workers have more money to spend, so they bid up the price of all the goods, and they only get as much for their money as before.

Its not all about just  the money.

I suggest you actually read Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson". It is available in its entirely in PDF format on a number of web sites. The chapter that is relevant to this discussion is XIX, but I recommend you read the whole thing from the beginning.

As Hazlitt wrote:

"Another curious but persistent notion is that the interests of a nation's workers are identical with each other, and that an increase in wages for one union in some obscure way helps all other workers. Not only is there no truth in this idea; the truth is that, if a particular union by coercion is able to enforce for its own members a wage substantially above the real market worth of their services, it will hurt all other workers as it hurts other members of the community."

You keep arguing against things that nobody has said. Please learn to pay attention to what people are actually saying before you respond.

There will always be a trade-off between wages and safety. It is a mistake for government to decide where that trade-off should be. If you combine it with government efforts to raise wages, the result is unemployment.

Thats the problem with arguing with progressives who think government is the solution to every problem. They can't seem to understand that everything is a trade-off. The supply of resources is always limited (though it is possible to expand them without any set limit, given time). Resources diverted to safety are not available to pay workers' wages. But progressives want both at the same time.

"There will always be a trade-off between wages and safety."

Yes, because we all know that the higher your wages, the more dangerous your job. This, of course, explains why coal miners make a ton more money than a coal company's CEO.

"The thing about free markets is that they reveal the reality that our resources at any one time are limited"

Which, of course, explains why free markets all over the world are running as fast as they can from fossil fuels. Markets don't reveal, so much as create resource fininity. It assumes the world is a never ending resource, as well as a bottomless trash heep.

matt, have to disagree with you somewhat on this. Every corporate entity will espouse the line that "Safety is our most important product". What they won't say is, "until it costs too much". The airline business is a prime example. Granted, commercial airliners are not exactly falling from the sky in large numbers, but that is due to many factors.

Every airline is continually looking for ways to save money on maintenance. There are many routine scheduled maintenance checks on airliners. Some are daily/weekly/monthly. Then there are the heavy maintenance checks where the plane is basically disassembled, inspected, repaired, and reassembled. You may be surprised to know that the majority of these heavy checks are done by third parties in foreign countries, by unlicensed mechanics, under the supervision of a single FAA certified mechanic watching 10-15 workers. Seamans, in Lima, Peru, for example. The company contracted with Seamans to do heavy checks, which run about $1.5 million each. The first 2 planes that returned were down for 2 weeks while our mechanics redid what was supposedly done in Peru. In the interest of safety, we refused to fly anymore jets that were maintained by Seamans. The company offered bonuses, but there were no takers. You couldn't pay me enough to fly that shit.

Remember the next time you plop your pink butt in an airliner, that it was maintained by the lowest bidder. Btw, we were in a union. Management was continually making threats about termination if we refused to fly a jet for whatever reason. One call to the FAA usually put the kabosh on their threats.

The MD-80 that crashed offshore in the Pacific, near LAX, a few years ago was due to the stab trim jackscrew being damaged because it was improperly lubricated. All aboard died. The investigation determined the airline was at fault because it hired a third party that failed to maintain that part. They were trying to save money. Not much safety going on there.