Organized Labor Split

Their action symbolizes the split in approach to the deployment of union power. The AFL-CIO wants to spend money on politics. The breakaway unions want to focus on organizing.

The breakup also illustrates the split personality of labor unions ever since their modern emergence in the nineteenth century. Were they to be activist organizations agitating for social gains in the political realm or were they self-help organizations dedicated to helping people on the ground.

The truth is that unions are mostly about politics. The Anglosphere entered the industrial era with a common law tradition that disapproved of “combinations” in restraint of trade. It took sympathetic public opinion and positive law to change this and to award organizations of working men the legal privilege to do what employers were forbidden to do: conspire in a cartel against the consumer.

Still, the American labor movement remained mostly a working-class movement right through most of the twentieth century under the leadership of men like cigar maker Samuel Gompers and plumber George Meany. Unlike the union movement in Europe, American union leaders kept the middle-class socialists out of their movement and thus kept a certain distance from politics.

Today, of course, as private sector union membership has declined to 8 percent of the labor force, the character of unions has changed. They are mainly associations of government workers that work with Democratic politicians to increase government spending in return for votes, wages, tenure, and pensions. The breakaway unions are private sector unions; they have a different agenda.

From the conservative perspective it is probably a good idea for the public sector and private sector unions to separate. It makes it easier to attack the AFL-CIO unions as greedy tax-eaters.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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