Government, says the old Chinese proverb, is more terrible than tigers. That is because government rests on force. But when private individuals are not restrained by government from using force in accordance with their own whims, we have something that is worse than tigers. In the well-known observation of Thomas Hobbes, life without government becomes nasty, brutish and short; even the non-tigerish become man eaters.
In choosing between tigers and something worse than tigers mankind is challenged to figure out a way of limiting the rule of the tiger State to defending borders, protecting citizens in their individual rights and keeping the environment free from communicable diseases. Our Founding Fathers thought they had solved the problem. With John Locke and other post-Hobbesean philosophers, they hoped that check-and-balance representative institutions would make governmental force both orderly and palatable. We would have sovereignty where we needed it, to provide for the Adam Smith triad of justice, safety and cleanliness. Parliaments, chivvied or bought by special interests, have often betrayed the Lockean hopes (indeed, Willmoore Kendall considered this to be the joker in the Locke deck), but it remains incontestable that if the State isn’t the sole repository of force life would be reduced to rule by gang shoot-outs mitigated by general anarchy.
Law, in the Lockean, or republican, State means that the taxpayer, as voter, calls the turn on where the tiger of government should be turned loose for controlled feeding. But when we have public-sector unions arrogating to themselves the right to strike against what the sovereign legislators choose to pay them, we have an absurd situation. The government is no longer sovereign. We have a two-headed arrangement, with the right of the people to rule colliding with the right of union-sanctioned arbitrators to infringe on popular sovereignty if it seems necessary to keep the public-sector union bosses happy.
In a wide-ranging essay, Sovereignty and Compulsory Public-Sector Bargaining (Wake Forest Law Review, reprinted as a pamphlet), Sylvester Petro has explored the whole reach of a crazy situation that is making government impossible in our big cities and even threatens the integrity of the federal union.
It seems strange to Dr. Petro that virtually nobody has caught on to the logical fallacy of supposing there could be a workable two-headed sovereign. Elected governments are supposed to have supreme governing power. But if a public-sector union can presume to refuse to collect the garbage, or to open and close draw bridges, or to put out fires, or to crack down on muggers and restrain street gangs, meanwhile coercing the government to reach a “collective bargaining” agreement that may or may not be within the taxing power of the government to sustain, just who is ruling us anyway?
Even if an “imperial” arbitrator is provided for in a collective public-sector bargaining agreement, the State loses control. The arbitrator, not the people, becomes the ultimate sovereign.
Union Bosses vs. Legislators
Once unions become recognized as compulsory bargaining units in the public sector it becomes impossible to deal with them in ways that will still permit legislatures to rule. In New York State the so-called Taylor Law supposedly established compulsory collective bargaining while prohibiting strikes by public employees. The result, as might have been foreseen, is just another dead-letter verboten. Garbage collectors and bridge tenders have gone on strike anyway. Since jails don’t exist that can hold thousands of strikers, the power to arrest becomes meaningless. An occasional union leader may go to jail, but this only hardens his rank-and-file followers, who forthwith make him a martyr. It does not bring strikers back to work.
As I write this review, the news from Scotland provides a grim underlining for Dr. Petro’s words. A ten-week strike by garbage truck drivers has left 70,000 tons of rotting garbage in the streets of Glasgow. The citizens have been afraid to become their own garbage collectors, for that would be “scabbing.” So the Royal Highland Fusiliers have had to be called from traditional guard duty at Edinburgh Castle, not to break the strike but to kill thousands of rats that have been running wild in the streets. Query: is it the union or the city hall that is sovereign in Glasgow? Or could it, ultimately, be the rats, who have controlled populations in the past by spreading bubonic plague?
Dr. Petro details the efforts of various labor-law writers to justify compulsory public-sector bargaining on the “private-sector analogy.” But there is no analogy. Private-sector bargaining under NLRB rules is bad enough, but, as Dr. Petro points out, there are market checks that keep both unions and employers within shouting distance of common sense. Private businesses must have some margin of profit if they are to continue paying union members. But no government agency is under what Dr. Petro calls “the uncompromising duty to make a profit which prevails in private business.” The public-sector union, run by power-hungry bosses, can be extortionate and still hope to collect on its extortion. People in civil society must have police and fire protection at any cost when the alternative, which is anarchy, is considered.
Campaign Funds
The effect of compulsory public-sector bargaining is to make government officials supine. Dr. Petro speaks of the “Hanslowe Effect,” named after a Cornell professor who has pointed out the collusive possibilities between unions and public officials once union-shop arrangements invade government. A public service union of teachers, for example, must, if dues are collected from everyone, be rich enough to make a profound impression on any politician needing funds for campaigning. Until very recently public servants, constrained by civil service rules, have been fairly unpolitical. But now that they are listening to the siren song of professional organizers, they are, in the words of boss Jerry Wurf, “political as hell.” The present contributions to political candidates are enormous, and they will grow greater as the likes of Mr. Wurf grow more powerful.
Dr. Petro explores many of the side effects on the quality of public service that have come with unionization. Is it a mere coincidence that there has been a drop in Scholastic Aptitude Tests since the public-school teachers began to be politicized? Can there be parental and taxpayer control of educational policy if the teachers become a monolithic unionized bloc?
When Albert Shanker speaks of organizing three million teachers into “the largest union in the U.S. ” he doesn’t say he hopes to control school curricula. But Mrs. Catherine Barrett, the head of the National Education Association, has been forthright about it. “We are the biggest potential political striking force in this country,” she said, “and we are determined to control the direction of education.”
With this sort of thing growing, the new “sovereign” (i.e., the entrenched compulsory public service union) could indeed be more terrible than tigers.
PURITAN ECONOMIC EXPERIMENTS by Gary North (Remnant Review, Box 5025, North Long Beach, California 90805, 1974) 40 pages, $.75.
FREEMAN readers will recall the series of three articles which appeared from April to June 1974, which are now available as a booklet.
Here is the long-neglected story of the Puritan economic experiment with government intervention in America. Between 1630 and about 1676, the new England Puritans — first cousins spiritually of the tiny band of Pilgrims in nearby Plymouth Colony — tried again and again to solve the problems of economic life by passing regulations. Each time the interventions made things worse. In the name of Christian charity and social responsibility, Puritans passed maximum wage laws, price controls, and import regulations. They created licensed monopolies in key occupations. They tried to regulate styles in clothing. They set maximum rates of interest. They regulated buying and selling of land. They tried to operate, through the civil government, huge parcels of “free” agricultural land. Finally, in the final quarter of the seventeenth century, they gave up. They opened up the economy as no society had ever done before. The foundations of American economic life were laid by men who had tried government intervention and had seen it fail.
