Boy, somebody had better let the unions know -- here's the WSJ's headline for an op-ed today:
Organized labor has become by far the most powerful political force in government.
I know, I know, you're wondering why you didn't hear about the Employee Free Choice Act passing. Well, it didn't, and unions, despite their efforts, are not the most powerful political force in government (that's the banks, remember?). When you read the article, by Steve Malanga, the argument gets watered down. He's not talking about all government, or even all unions, he's writing specifically about public-sector unions and state governments, arguing that dastardly unions lobbied hard to get recession funding for state governments at the expense of private-sector workers. He doesn't mention that most economists think that funding for states during a recession is critical to halting economic contraction, nor does he consider that perhaps public-sector workers are the kind that you don't want to lay off en masse because they provide a public good. It's telling that he only mentions teachers, a unionized occupation that everybody love to demagogue, but not policemen, firemen, paramedics, bus drivers, or road service crews. Let me put it to you, citizen -- should we lay off half your town's police force because of their dastardly union politicking?
Unsurprisingly, the whole focus on public-sector unions is a canard for anti-tax sentiments -- he blames, for instance, tax increases in California and New York on the public-sector unions, but those tax increases were in response to budget crises brought on, especially in California, by previous anti-tax radicalism. For my part, I don't think states should be raising taxes during a recession; the federal government should be providing countercyclical aid through deficit spending, but that's neither here nor there. Public employee strikes that occurred 50 years ago have little to do with today's debates about taxes, and even though public sector unions don't always provide for the best policy outcomes, that's a reason to engage them, not abolish them. If Malanga wants to argue that we should cut taxes in order to pay firemen and policemen less, that's acceptable, if misguided. But he shouldn't play Orwellian language games when he does it -- just come right out with it.
UPDATE: The one and only Chris Hayes e-mails along his smart review of Malanga's 2005 book, which seems to be of a type with this op-ed. Here's the crux of the Hayes' argument:
The political lesson here is that special interests are in the eye ofthe beholder: Malanga thinks that janitors who clean buildings foreight dollars an hour are a special interest, while I tend to thinkthat middle-age white guys whose cushy sinecures at conservative thinktanks nicely insulate them from the vicissitudes of the same freemarket they so fetishize are a special interest.
-- Tim Fernholz
