>>and those who can extract rent without working due only to having a monopoly on capital.
No capital owner has a monopoly on capital, and capital owners do not collude to act as one with respect to recruiting workers, making your claim totally specious. Also, typically businesses don't extract economic rent. Investment is a difficult and risk-filled enterprise, that adds value to the economy, making it by definition, not a form of rent extraction.
I suggest putting aside Marxist narratives and studying mainstream Economics, which would dispel you of these fallacies on which your claims of class victimhood rest.
>>This is simply not true. Notice how the best countries to live in the world are invariably those with more labour protections and a mixed economy with heavy public participation. Limiting ourselves to the US, compare the standard of living in the gilded age vs the golden age of American labour organisation.
You just criticized me for making the correlation equals causation argument with respect to Detroit and then you go on to make a far more egregious use of this argument in claiming that conditions being worse in an era 80 years prior tell us the policies in place 80 years prior were worse.
A rational analysis compares the trajectory of an economy relative to its contemporaries when trying to use comparisons between different eras to decipher what works. The fact is wages and productivity grow faster on average in countries where labor markets are more free. The Nordic countries saw far faster economic growth relative to the rest of the world when they were more free market economies and have been leapfrogged by Singapore and Hong-Kong in life expectancy since abandoning those free market policies and embracing socialism-lite.
>>Also I did not even say anything about "government seizing control"
The government mandating companies to enter into collective bargaining to the exclusion of negotiating with any other worker is the government taking control of the shareholder's negotiating agency with respect to their property. Without this compulsion, the ability of unions to extract economic rent would be non-existent.
No capital owner has a monopoly on capital, and capital owners do not collude to act as one with respect to recruiting workers, making your claim totally specious. Also, typically businesses don't extract economic rent. Investment is a difficult and risk-filled enterprise, that adds value to the economy, making it by definition, not a form of rent extraction.
I suggest putting aside Marxist narratives and studying mainstream Economics, which would dispel you of these fallacies on which your claims of class victimhood rest.
>>This is simply not true. Notice how the best countries to live in the world are invariably those with more labour protections and a mixed economy with heavy public participation. Limiting ourselves to the US, compare the standard of living in the gilded age vs the golden age of American labour organisation.
You just criticized me for making the correlation equals causation argument with respect to Detroit and then you go on to make a far more egregious use of this argument in claiming that conditions being worse in an era 80 years prior tell us the policies in place 80 years prior were worse.
A rational analysis compares the trajectory of an economy relative to its contemporaries when trying to use comparisons between different eras to decipher what works. The fact is wages and productivity grow faster on average in countries where labor markets are more free. The Nordic countries saw far faster economic growth relative to the rest of the world when they were more free market economies and have been leapfrogged by Singapore and Hong-Kong in life expectancy since abandoning those free market policies and embracing socialism-lite.
>>Also I did not even say anything about "government seizing control"
The government mandating companies to enter into collective bargaining to the exclusion of negotiating with any other worker is the government taking control of the shareholder's negotiating agency with respect to their property. Without this compulsion, the ability of unions to extract economic rent would be non-existent.