One of the central issues of right-wing politics is the strange dynamic between Conservatism and Libertarianism. Back when I was a Libertarian, I was always surprised by how the two party system monopolized all the polls. Today it seems all too easy to get caught up in the overly politicized Liberal/Conservative media circus but when I was growing up news was freaking boring and there simply weren’t a lot of polarizing political pundits on television. Rush Limbaugh was still on, and he even had a television show back when I was in high school, but it was on really late and his audience was packed full of nothing but cowboys and assorted yahoos, none below the age of 50.

Some time around 2004, I noticed that the name Libertarian had become more and more associated with the right wing, with so-called Libertarians hating on Democrats more than Republicans, rather than taking the netural socially liberal, fiscally conservtive stance that I had come to associate it with. Back when I was in high school, I agreed with a lot of radical Libertarian ideas like going back to the gold standard, but it seemed to me that by the turn of the century, Libertarianism was becoming more of a safe harbor for pro-Business refugees escaping the teetering Republican brand name as the growing unpopularity of the Bush Administration reached historic proportions. The newfound popularity of Libertarianism around 2004 started to make me feel cheated, like one of those underground music lovers who hates the newfound popularity of a band once they “sold out” (I’ve seen others have similar feeling when anime suddenly became popular).

Now it seems there is a whole swarth of assorted Libertarians and Tea Party Patriots who have decided the real problem with the economy are those greedy teachers sucking money away with their collective bargaining rights. But it seems like once some Libertarian group like the Tea Party gets too popular it’s taken over by Social Conservatives.

So one of the ways I distinguish true Libertarians from Corporate Socialists is their stance on unions. On general principle, Libertarians support the rights of free association and should allow collective bargaining. Reason’s Libertarian blog, Hit and Run, talks about “How to Make Unions More Powerful the Libertarian Way.” Corporate Socialists, like the Cato Institute, instead says that “Collective bargaining is a misguided labor policy because it violates civil liberties and gives unions excessive power to block needed reforms.”

So when the issue with public unions came up in Wisconsin, I started asking some people, “Aren’t unions part of the ‘invisible hand’?”

One answer I got was: “Not for public service unions!!!!! Don’t you know your history? They were not even allowed to organize ubtil the 1960s. FDR said that if allowed that they would destroy America and that was in the 1930s!!!!”

Obviously, whenever someone says, “Don’t you know your history?”, it’s pretty much a gurantee that they are about to say something that they just heard in the last week or so.

My reply was: “Oh, yeah, I support the Democrats instead of the Republicans on the Wisconsin unions so therefore I don’t know history. And I bet you didn’t know Reagan supported unions and was the only president who was also a union leader. Oh! Must mean you don’t know history!”

The answer I got was: “Well then I guess you know that Reagon crushed the Flight Controlers’ Union”

At this point I decided to do a little more research. This was my extended reply:

So FDR said public sector unions would “destroy America.” I’m guessing you got that from Beck since he used the same wording: that FDR said “collective bargaining would destroy us.” Haven’t you figured out by now that Glenn Beck’s history is complete bullshit?

FDR said “Organizations of Government employees have a logical place in Government affairs” and “The desire of Government employees for fair and adequate pay … is basically no different from that of employees in private industry. Organization on their part to present their views on such matters is both natural and logical, but meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government.”

He also signed the National Industrial Recovery Act Of 1933 and the Tennessee Valley Authority Act Recognized Collective Bargaining Rights, both of which guaranteed collective bargaining rights for unions and the National Labor Relations Act Of 1935 Prohibited Employers From Barring Workers From Bargaining Collectively. In his 1940 Labor Day speech, he touted the “splendid new agreement” between labor and the federal government:

“Never once in these years, in this the biggest consolidated construction job ever undertaken directly by the national Government, has there been a substantial interruption to the continuance of your labors. This Dam, all the dams built in this short space of years, stand as a monument to the productive partnership between management and labor, between citizens of all kinds working together in the public weal. Collective bargaining and efficiency have proceeded hand in hand. It is noteworthy that the splendid new agreement between organized labor and the Tennessee Valley Authority begins with the words “The public interest in an undertaking such as the TVA always being paramount …”

What FDR was against was public workers striking. This is also the same reason Reagan broke up the Air Traffic Controllers strike: because it was against the law to strike.

Is this really the battle you sent the Republicans — sorry, I mean the “Tea Party Coalition of Republicans and Democrats” — back to fight? To break apart teacher unions? Is that what this epiphany of outrage was all about? Not to cap banker salaries, not to reform the banks or the financial laws, but to break apart unions in Wisconsin? I thought you supported a minimum wage. That goes against free association to artifically bring wages up. Union breaking goes against free association to artifically bring wages down.

The good news is Fox is seriously considering dumping Beck now that he has lost a third of his viewership, so maybe I won’t have to deal with factchecking his fantasy world conservatives like to call “history.” If they do that, Fox will have to rely far more on falsified polls, like the one where they reversed the percentages in order to claim 61% of Americans supported ending collective bargaining, not 61% are for keeping collective bargaining.

When I asked for a reply, he suddenlly became too busy.

Another talking point I’ve heard from multiple right-wingers is that unions have gotten too powerful in recent history. The truth, however, is the opposite: union membership is at a historic low. Labor Unions are down to 12% in the United States while Sweden and Denmark had union membership at 95% in 1990!

From the New York Times:

For the first time in American history, a majority of union members are government workers rather than private-sector employees, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Friday.

In its annual report on union membership, the bureau undercut the longstanding notion that union members are overwhelmingly blue-collar factory workers. It found that membership fell so fast in the private sector in 2009 that the 7.9 million unionized public-sector workers easily outnumbered those in the private sector, where labor’s ranks shrank to 7.4 million, from 8.2 million in 2008.

From Wikipedia:

American union membership in the private sector has in recent years fallen under 9% — levels not seen since 1932.American unions remain an important political factor, both through mobilization of their own memberships and through coalitions with like-minded activist organizations around issues such as immigrant rights, trade policy, health care, and living wagecampaigns. Unions allege that employer-incited opposition has contributed to this decline in membership.

….

Union membership had been steadily declining in the US since 1983. In 2007, the labor department reported the first increase in union memberships in 25 years and the largest increase since 1979. Most of the recent gains in union membership have been in the service sector while the number of unionized employees in the manufacturing sector has declined. Most of the gains in the service sector have come in West Coast states like California where union membership is now at 16.7% compared with a national average of about 12.1%.[7]
Union density (the percentage of workers belonging to unions) has been declining since the late 1940s, however. Almost 36% of American workers were represented by unions in 1945.Historically, the rapid growth of public employee unions since the 1960s has served to mask an even more dramatic decline in private-sector union membership.
At the apex of union density in the 1940s, only about 9.8% of public employees were represented by unions, while 33.9% of private, non-agricultural workers had such representation. In this decade, those proportions have essentially reversed, with 36% of public workers being represented by unions while private sector union density had plummeted to around 7%. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent survey indicates that union membership in the US has risen to 12.4% of all workers, from 12.1% in 2007. For a short period, private sector union membership rebounded, increasing from 7.5% in 2007 to 7.6% in 2008. [8] However, that trend has since reversed. In 2009, the union density for private sector stood at 7.2%.

…

Possible causes of drop in union density:

Public approval of unions climbed between 1981 and 1988, with 61% of Americans approving of unions in 1988. The rate of public confidence in the United States during this same time differed little from the analogous rate in other industrialized nations.

More recently, as unions have become increasingly concerned with the impacts of market integration on their well-being, scholars have begun to assess whether popular concerns about a global “race to the bottom” are reflected in cross-country comparisons of union strength. These scholars use foreign direct investment (FDI) and the size of a country’s international trade as a percentage of its GDP to assess a country’s relative degree of market integration. These researchers typically find that globalizationdoes affect union density, but is dependent on other factors, such as unions’ access to the workplace and the centralization of bargaining.[17] Sano and Williamson argue that globalization’s impact is conditional upon a country’s labor history.[18] In the United States in particular, which has traditionally had relatively low levels of union density, globalization did not appear to significantly affect union density.

Studies focusing more narrowly on the U.S. labor movement corroborate the comparative findings about the importance of structural factors, but tend to emphasize the effects of changing labor markets due to globalization to a greater extent. Bronfenbrenner notes that changes in the economy, such as increased global competition, capital flight, and the transitions from a manufacturing to a service economy and to a greater reliance on transitory and contingent workers, accounts for only a third of the decline in union density.[19] She claims that the federal government in the 1980s was largely responsible for giving employers the perception that they could engage in aggressive strategies to repress the formation of unions. Richard Freeman also points to the role of repressive employer strategies in reducing unionization, and highlights the way in which a state ideology of anti-unionism tacitly accepted these strategies [13] Goldfield notes that the overall effects of globalization on unionization in the particular case of the United States may be understated in econometric studies on the subject.[20] He writes that the threat of production shifts reduces unions’ bargaining power even if it does not eliminate them, and also claims that most of the effects of globalization on labor’s strength are indirect. They are most present in change towards a neoliberal political context that has promoted the deregulation and privatization of some industries and accepted increased employer flexibility in labor markets.