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Notes -
I think you're sort of making two points here:
Union shops can't compete with non-union shops because their costs are higher, and
If all shops for a given industry in a given market are unionized then the customer suffers higher prices.
My responses to those are:
Agreed, we should really try to make sure all shops are unionized so it's a fair playing field.
Agreed, we should really make sure that all industries across all markets are unionized, so that everyone has better wages and can afford those higher prices.
Trying to pit workers against consumers through the contrivance of higher prices is a common rhetorical tactic, but what it elides is that all workers are consumers and most consumers are (or are supported by) workers. Helping one helps the other.
It’s not just a “rhetorical” trick. Labor is one of the main inputs I ti goods so most of higher labor costs do flow to it prices.
Sounds like you want everyone unionized. That sounds like you would be fixing the price of labor in the economy which would mean no more market for labor. Personally markets appear quite successful so I wouldn’t want to go down that route. And prices themselves gives producers a ton of signals on how to produce things more efficiently.
I feel like what you want is basically just communism and it doesn’t work.
The 'trick' is not saying the second half of the sentence, which is 'and consumers can better afford those increased prices because of their increased wages.'
If wages go up 15% and prices go up 5%, consumers are better off. The trick is pretending that consumers and workers are different people, and only looking at how something affects one of them, instead of looking at both sides of the equation and asking whether it's a net gain or a net loss.
Unionization only eliminates market forces if everyone in the country is in the same union, which would indeed be weird. The point is to have enough unions that a boss firing everyone in one union to switch to another is as costly and disruptive for them as losing a job and trying to find a new one would be to an employee.
Rounding everything that advocates for any change at all to the current economic regime off to 'communism' is a thought-terminating cliche in discussions like this.
That’s sounds like make believe. It’s not a “trick”. It’s just let’s assume prices and wages go up different amounts.
The magic of markets is the price system and firms competing in prices forced them to become more efficient.
At best this sounds like pre-Reagan/Thatcher where growth was slower and people were poorer. You would need to invalidate the productivity gains from that era.
With history as a guide the more likely scenerio would be prices go up 30% and wages go up 15%.
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