Okay, so I don't care much for labor unions. Private, Public -- it don't matter. This crypto- (and not so crypto-) communism just makes life more expensive of us by making goods and services higher priced, making government the morass of inefficiency we all know and love, and even by subverting morality by trying to make you feel sorry for them for being a bunch of undertrained crybabies who want to the world made to suit their particular mediocrity, while hurling vile epithets at you when all you want to do is run their picket-line guantlet do to buy some bread. When my revolution comes, you can be sure they'll be up against the wall. Fortunately, none of this is needed.

Evan Kirchoff explains why as writes a blisteringly intelligent indictment of obsolete labor unions (although he is more sympathetic to inherently hostile pinkos than I):

OK, smart guy, I have a better idea: I'll keep shopping where I do now, you send me a list of five local Safeway baggers, and I will mail each of them a $40 check every month, for a total of $200/month. If that seems silly, explain to me the difference between this and what you're asking me to do, since the outcome is exactly the same and my proposal at least has the virtue of transparency.

And consider this: we are being asked to feel a moral obligation towards subsidizing the profession of bagger for a large corporate supermarket chain, which makes momentary sense only if your historical horizon is so short that you take "supermarkets" for granted. But the very notion of a "supermarket" rests on the destruction of a long list of what once were lifelong professions: all those small bakeries now replaced by machine-made loaves of bread trucked out from a central factory in the dead of night; all those butcher shops, delis, pasta-makers, crafters of sauces and pickles, photo-development booths, and all the other specialties now rolled into one building with fewer people in it. I'm guessing that each job of "supermarket bagger" is built on the grave of a dozen or more former jobs.

I'm no market purist -- or, rather, I am, but I don't seriously expect it to catch on -- and I can see the issue from the point of view of a 40-year-old bagger with kids. But here's the most charitable way I can describe their condition: a 40-year-old bagger with kids has essentially been swindled into believing that their labor would be worth more in the long term than it really is, and hence they failed to bail out in time and are now painted into a corner. As a result, we (again, speaking as non-market-purists here) might owe that person more than a boot out the door -- an easy letdown, some assistance in career swapping, maybe even employment at current wage levels to the point that it obliterates Vons and Safeway entirely, if you think that meets some sort of social cost-benefit analysis. In other words, if you want to treat existing jobs partially as welfare programs for employees over a certain age, I do at least understand your argument. Just don't pretend this is a moral principle that can be scaled to anything beyond a hand-picked set of cases.

But what we absolutely do not owe anybody is the pretense that increasingly valueless labor is worth more than it really is. In fact, I would say that we have a positive moral duty in the opposite direction: our priority should be to discourage young people (for example, through low wages) from becoming lifelong grocery baggers in the first place, since that profession is about to die and their labor is urgently needed elsewhere in the economy. Where would "elsewhere" be? I'm not sure (although I'd start with "plumber" and "housecleaner" and the other manual trades where wage and price increases signal obvious shortages). But it is extremely unlikely, after several centuries in which nearly every profession has been repeatedly destroyed and replaced with something more valuable and higher-paying, and unemployment has decreased to within single digits of zero even while the labor pool has increased dramatically, that the death of the supermarket grocery bagger marks some kind of special tipping-point. I realize that intuitive plausibility will always be on Reich's side; I would argue that on mine is a healthy chunk of human economic history, plus the fact that global poverty is at both an all-time low and a record rate of decrease.

Heh.