Beware of newspaper columns that begin, “Once upon a time.”
That’s how Paul Krugman opened his Christmas Eve New York
Times op-ed. “[B]ack when America had a strong middle
class, it also had a strong union movement. These two facts were
connected,” he argued.
Continuing his liberal bedtime story, Krugman wrote, “Unions
negotiated good wages and benefits for their workers, gains that
often ended up being matched even by nonunion employers. They also
provided an important counterbalance to the political influence of
corporations and the economic elite.”
The fascinating thing about Krugman’s argument is that all of
his premises can be ceded without accepting his conclusion that “a
strong union movement” was the cause and “a strong middle class”
the effect.
Any conservative who dared make such a straightforward
cause-and-effect claim — about gun control and the District of
Columbia’s crime rate, say — would be accused of being
“simplistic.” In fact, Krugman’s crude claim of causation reveals
the dishonesty of liberal objections to simplistic argument. So
long as one is arguing on behalf of liberal agendas and Democratic
constituencies, no such objection is ever heard.
Krugman reduces decades of economic history to a single-factor
analysis that hinges on a fight for “political influence” between
(a) the “union movement” and (b) “corporations and the economic
elite.”
Well, once upon a time, such arguments tended to end with
“Workers of the world unite!” Krugman is, after all, setting up the
classic proletariat-vs.-capital showdown that inspired the fevered
dreams of Marxism. Whereas Marx and his followers saw downtrodden
industrial toilers as the world-historical force destined to rise
up in revolutionary fury, however, Krugman’s sloganeering
conscripts the middle class to the task.
He is a thoroughly bourgeois revolutionary, and it is therefore
not surprising that Krugman’s Christmas Eve manifesto was issued on
behalf of John Edwards, the multimillionaire trial lawyer and
Democratic presidential candidate whose “populist message resonates
with labor.”
ASSISTED BY UNION-controlled political groups, Edwards is reprising
his famous “two Americas” 2004 campaign theme, premised on the same
sort of simplistic single-factor argument that Krugman made. In
this populist fairy tale, Americans can be divided neatly into two
groups, the villainous “rich” and everybody else. It is the
political influence of the rich, embodied in the Republican Party,
that explains whatever woe afflicts everybody else.
Implicit in this myth is the existence of a lost postwar Golden
Age of middle-class comfort, to which we may return by electing
Democrats and enacting their preferred economic policies (which,
not coincidentally, are those endorsed by Big Labor).
There are three chief problems with this liberal fantasy. The
first is that the Golden Age wasn’t really so golden. This point
was most persuasively argued by David Frum in his book How We
Got Here: The '70s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For
Better or Worse.
For all the hazy nostalgia attached to the Ozzie-and-Harriet
era, Frum points out, the quarter-century following the end of
World War II was typified by a level of regimentation — including
the military draft and leftover New Deal economic regulation —
that was fundamentally at odds with American ideals of liberty.
The second problem with this mythical Golden Age is that its
genuine golden qualities were not the fruit of union-backed
politics. The AFL-CIO bosses and their political henchmen did not
produce the widespread prosperity and upward mobility of the 1950s
and '60s.
To the extent that it was really golden, the Era was the product
of a unique set of historical conditions. On the heels of the Great
Depression, the United States had marshaled its industrial
potential to achieve victory in a war that devastated the
infrastructures of America’s chief economic competitors, especially
Germany and Japan.
Emerging with its industrial capacity unscathed and its
workforce accustomed to wartime discipline, postwar America
benefited from a source of capital never mentioned by the populist
mythologists. Four years of rationing and war-bond drives had
prevented Americans from purchasing consumer goods, while
encouraging them — forcing them, really — to save wartime wages
inflated by the emergency demand for labor. When wartime controls
ended, these artificially imposed savings flooded into the
marketplace, unleashing a tsunami of consumer demand that created
unstoppable economic momentum.
Contrary to the Krugman-Edwards delusion that the good times of
the '50s and '60s were caused by the political supremacy of labor
unions, the causation was more likely the other way around: Because
of the good times, perhaps, workers didn’t much mind paying union
dues, and the political influence of union bosses was a largely a
function of their fat coffers.
Yet that happy honeymoon was over before it really began. In
1946, Americans elected a Republican Congress, and in 1947, the
newly elected GOP majority overrode President Harry Truman’s veto
to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, limiting the coercive and often
violent means by which union bosses had established their
stranglehold on the American economy.
Stripped of legal sanction for their thuggish abuses, unions
soon began losing membership. After cresting at nearly 33 percent
in 1953 — the belated upswing caused by new employees joining
already-unionized workplaces — Big Labor’s share of the workforce
dwindled steadily. By 1979, less than a quarter of American workers
were union members. A decade later, fewer than one-in-six U.S.
workers belonged to a union. Today, it’s fewer than
one-in-eight.
THIS TREND POINTS TO the third problem with the Krugman-Edwards
populist myth. Taft-Hartley doesn’t prevent workers from joining
unions; it only prevents unions from forcing workers to join.
The American exodus from the Egyptian bondage of coercive
unionism is entirely voluntary — and in many cases, this exodus
has been more than a metaphor. U.S. population has been drastically
reapportioned in the past half-century, with people departing the
heavily-unionized Northeast and Midwest in favor of Sunbelt states
where right-to-work laws prevent unions from extracting dues from
unwilling workers.
Americans have voted with their feet, and there is not the
slightest evidence that the 87 percent of non-unionized U.S.
workers crave an opportunity to pay for the privilege of union
membership.
If further refutation of the Krugman-Edwards mythology were
needed, one might point out that union membership is only 7.4
percent in the private sector, compared to 36 percent for
government workers, and that union membership is practically
non-existent in the Information Age industries where productivity,
growth, and wages are highest.
Krugman’s fairy tale may give Edwards a boost in the race for
the Democratic presidential nomination. Voters who understand
economic reality aren’t likely to trudge through the snows of Iowa
to participate in a Democratic caucus. But if liberals expect to
win the White House on the basis of Big Labor mythology, 2008 will
prove a very unhappy year for Democrats.
Robert Stacy McCain is co-author (with Lynn Vincent)
of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic
Party (Nelson Current).
