smooth

My opinion of your post is that you haven't disagreed with everything I wrote. You have, however, utilized carefully selected wording to answer portions of my comments while simultaneously ignoring others. I just don't know if you did so intentionally.

For example, you used examples of Canadian protections for workers in regards to intra-national movement. Yet, those protections do not extend to their actions in so far as they might operate outside the bounds of the Canadian nation-state. I, as a US citizen, am not free to move into Canada and start working at will. You are not free, as a Canadian citizen, to move into the US and start working at will. If cost/benefit was the issue, that would approximate a more free market than what we have now. Cost is not the issue, however; rather, legal constraints are.

Furthermore, the Canadian protections for workers to move intra-nationally does nothing for an external consumer--the other end of the spectrum in my example of how capital controls the market rather than unseen forces. We could examine, for instance, the highly publicized debate over prescription medications. U.S. consumers are currently prevented from legally purchasing medications from Canada (and Mexico, among other places). Tariffs and favorable special trade agreements are not natural functions of the market. They are functions of government, guided by politics.


I actually had a detailed description of the two main views of how government responds to capital, but I erased it due to the fear that it would take too long to read and start looking like I was pontificating on something not really germaine to the discussion. At this point, however, I think I should at least respond to the view you ascribed to me in your comments.

I do not necessarily think that capital makes laws and overt demands on the government to regulate labor/consumption. Actually, I should say that it doesn't have to happen that way. An alternate view is that the people who run governments share similar class positions and interests as those who run capital. Their views on how the world, and the market, should operate are pretty similar. In the states, they go to the same schools together, they move laterally from economic domains to political domains to military domains, and they hold social functions together to rub elbows with the right people. The point is that there need not be an overt demand on politics for law to protect the interests of capital--we would expect it to naturally.


All this is to say that when people argue unions are artificial constraints or pressures on the market, such a statement completely ignores the political/legal realities that our labor market is no where near approximating a freely operating beast in the ways that Adam Smith wrote about. I reference Smith again because free-market proponents, in the US at least, speak of his work as their bible, yet they ignore the other half of the equation he laid out--free mobility of labor.

When a GM factory shuts it's doors in Michigan, due to overpriced labor or low sales or to bust a striking community, and opens a factory in Mexico, the community in Michigan should be able to move to Mexico and seek access to the employment in the newly opening factory. As of right now, they can't even while I admit that some won't. It simply makes sense then to attempt to unionize the workers in Mexico. In so far as it violates principles of a free market, it should only be understood as a response to capital's control over the market as it currently exists.

The "invisible hand," in the context I have described, becomes capital's influence over the laws that govern the market--not natural forces.

If economic models are incapable, or refuse, to account for the socio-legal realities on our global market, then I claim the models are deficient. If you want to step back and state that you have limited knowledge on politics and international labor laws, how can you then adequately discuss the ramifications, dangers, benefits, & etc. of unionized labor?

If your models are inadequate to account for some of the issues I brought up, and the data you feed into them inadquately addresses the context it exists within, then the addage 'garbage in >> garbage out' applies.


We could agree to disagree, but I don't see that as particularly profitable. We can move on to a different subject, if you prefer. But we can also spend our time here on this topic as easily as any other. We could, for example, pool our knowledge, yours in economics and mine in law & society, and begin a multi-disciplinary discussion of the issue at hand. Perhaps then we will come up with a trans-disciplinary question we can probe--one that breaks through discursive layers and opens new fields of inquiry.

Otherwise I have to continue learning what Marx and Weber say about politics and law with little to no knowledge of how economies operate.
You have to continue learning what Marx and Weber say about economies with little to no knowledge of how politics and law intersect with economies.
I think that's tragic because I know both of them studied all of these subjects holistically, yet modern students are short-changed in their ability to do the same.

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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman