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12/20/2002 04:54:00 PM | Jared Alessandroni Jeepers Not that I really know what jeepers means, but, anyway, I don't think that Blogs should get personal. Not in terms of some pedantic snobs with Culture | Academia etc. or especially internally. In regards to Unions, and what I said about them, I wasn't offering a solution. I just said, I thought clearly, I don't love unions, but they are our only option against government/business tyranny. In fact, this whole situation is such a blatant example of that, that it fascinates me that some still argue for the government. The argument about how much these workers or any should get is entirely distinct. I was saying that they should have a voice, that's all. How much people deserve to make is a huge discussion which involves professional athletes, teachers, executives, and everyone else. If anyone dreams that they have found some magical formula for how this should in fact work, I'd be very open to hearing it. And I wasn't preaching Klein to you, I was trying to demonstrate the scale of the problem. However, perhaps we all could use a little half-articulated idealistic anti-commecialism dribble, it seems like some would rather slide with the other side - if the problems are so big and so confusing for pwetty rich wittle heads, then why should we be bothered to solve them? Maybe Stevenson's right about ideological attachments - the see-saw is just too high for some. Anyway, that has nothing to do with the main point at hand, which was my initial argument that the workers were screwed. They were in that Bloomberg chose to use a 40 year-old law that should be questioned anyway to prevent them from having power. Should workers have power, yes. Are unions the only way to do that? In this conception of reality, until someone comes up with a better idea - Brad, I await yours - I think that they are. How do we prevent unions from having too much power? Well, as Adam Smith would have said had he not been such a tight-ass, the shit will take care of itself. If we can look at unions as parasites, or even if we just see them as dependents, either way, if they suck too much blood, the host dies. Now, one might exclaim excitedly, you can't just kill a poor business, but even more importantly, you can't just kill a city. Well, you can, but obviously you'd be motivated not to, 'cause you wouldn't have a damn job at the end. I feel ridiculous writing about basic market economics after just talking about communism, but really, it shouldn't even be a question. What happens when people are dependent, poeple dying in those ambulances? Hate to put the shocker out, but what happens when a functionally illiterate pre-hominid sends people to an oil war? People die. What happens when a mayor whose only accomplishment was standing in front of some towers looking touched and, of course, hiding poor people, spends five years draining the city's resources with cosmetics and tax breaks for the rich? No money, then people die. If a government sucks, just like if a company sucks, it does not succeed. Do people in general deserve the assholes they vote for, yes. Should these transit workers be stepped on because of it? No. If New York's deficit grows because these people get treated fairly, then so it is. If people die because this government refuses to find other options, then the fault is the government's. It is, as I've said before, a perversion of sense to hold the workers accountable and excuse the government's myopia. As for solutions, I have one. Justice. We should trust our sense of justice and our sense of fairness above the imbecilities of those who seek to challenge them and those who ignorantly seek to defend those who challenge them. In a more concrete sense, in New York, they should have been able to strike. That would have been fair. If they had, it would have soon been apparent that the government had not handled the situation well. Perhaps people might have even latched on to the gross mistakes of the previous government's economic policy. Or else, people would have seen through the selfishness of the union, those bastards wanting to make more than 32 grand a year (what you get if you're not management - it was obviously missed how blatantly misleading that $44,000 figure was) and actually send their kids to college or something assanine like that. The people, rabble rabble, would make the union look awful they'd lose membership, etc. blah blah blah, this, Adam Smith, is the whole idea. If things were fair then it would work. That's my solution, though only situationally. Conceptually, unions don't work, and that government doesn't work, and people are ignorant, and and and and. I await other solutions as they may come. perma link |
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