Mea Culpa

I don't know who said it first, but I'll buy this: the most dangerous kind of man is a fanatic. And I'm not talking about the obvious examples either: the Islamic terrorist, the IRA freedom fighter, the anti-drug crusader. Fanaticism in any form can quickly turn you dangerous. Buddhists have been known to riot in some parts of Indonesia and do pretty despicable things, after all.

Then there's me. As a free-market economist by experience and education, I have always hated unions with a passion. And I'm generally right.

Unions generally exist for their own ends, dragging down perfectly fine businesses for their own ends without even helping the workers they purport to help. They are the enemies of efficiency. Take, for example, road construction crews. Did you ever notice that when you drive past a team of road construction workers -- all union, of course -- it's always a group of four or five guys, but only one of them is actually working? The other four stand around -- looking into space, grabbing their crotches, smoking a cigarette, whatever -- but doing nothing of use. Why are my tax dollars being wasted on these guys, I wonder?

And there's teacher's unions. Did you know we spend more money per student, even after accounting for inflation, than we did 20 and 30 years ago, and that most of that -- some estimates say 80 percent -- are just for teacher salaries? And yet student performance -- measured in terms of literacy or math competency -- falls every year, both in absolute terms and relative to other countries. Teachers work seven hours a day (a seven hour work day, minus an hour for lunch and one hour spent "monitoring" a study hall, but two hours spent grading papers) nine months a year, but get paid as much as many engineers and nurses. That's a sweet deal. But teacher's unions do their best to hide those facts from the public. Anytime we ask that a teacher prove that he or she knows the material he or she is expected to teach our children, or demosntrate some minimum level of teaching competency, to try a new method -- in short, they scream that "We don't care about the children." That's the union working against the public good.

And speaking of unions working against the public good, enough has been written and said by New Yorkers who had to slog through the cold when the city's subway and bus workers went on strike. Billions of dollars lost -- poor workers unable to get to work, and thus unable to get the money they needed to feed their kids. Mom and pop stores that might be forced to go out of business because no one could go shopping the week before Christmas -- the most important retail season of the year. All because the union thought it was reasonable in this day and age to insist on fully employer-funded health care, an employer-funded pension system that let you retire at age 55, salaries for unskilled laborers that broke the $50K mark, and yearly guaranteed raises of 10 percent.

So I think I'm justified in thinking that unions are the parasitic bane of society, and if allowed a continued existence, will destroy our society.

Then a mine explodes in West Virginia, and I remember that before unions existed, this kind of thing happened all the time. And miners were forced to work seven days a week, 12-15 hours a day, and there were no such things as safety standards. And the miners were effectively forced to rent overpriced, shabby company-owned housing and buy overpriced goods and food from company-owned stores -- none of which they could afford. Which meant that the miners had no chance of ever being out of the company's debt. It was legalized indentured servitude.

Today, 13 miners were trapped in a mine for 41 hours, and it made national -- perhaps worldwide -- headlines. Once upon a time, it would have been a fairly low-key day. As I write this, 12 of the miners have just been found alive, though one didn't make it. But there will be investigations. And outrage. And the miners will receive at least some recompensation.

That's thanks to unions.

Thanks to unions, JH, a very good friend of mine -- a guy who works harder than anyone I've ever met, and still finds time to be a great husband, father, and friend -- is able to negotiate a decent health care deal and a wage that lets him give his sons a chance to fulfill their potential.

And thanks to unions, P, another friend of mine, didn't go to bed hungry at night when she was a little girl because her dad couldn't always win the competition for scarce construction jobs.

So. Maybe all of us, even I, owe unions a little gratitude.

But I'm still fucking pissed off at the Transit Workers Union. May TWU President Roger Toussaint drown in a torrent of explosive elephant diarrhea.