The View From 1776

Many people, even conservatives, will be much offended by the characterization of labor unions as Nazis.  In this case the characterization is meant, not as an indiscriminate pejorative of the sort that liberal-progressive-socialists ignorantly apply to anyone whom they dislike.  It is used here as a reference to a fundamental tenet of Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party:  the aim to insulate German workers and farmers from foreign competition. 

The overarching idea was to foster German self-sufficiency as a reaction against World War I reparations and as a way to restore German economic prosperity.  Ultimately it became a launching platform for imperial aggression to acquire land, resources, and slave labor from neighboring nations to fortify national self-sufficiency.

With the same motives, American labor unions oppose trade agreements that encourage world free trade, because cheaper, high-quality imports threaten the unions’ Federally supported powers to extort above-market wages and benefits.

Nazi, by the way, is simply the short name for Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party.  The party slogan was “ The Common Good Outranks Private Profit,” and the aims proclaimed for the German political state were essentially the same as those promised by Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural address of April 1933. 

In a 1927 speech, Hitler said, “We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” That is an apt summary of the tenets of community organizer Saul Alinsky, puppet-master David Axelrod, and the rest of the Obama administration.

Apart from his racist theories leading to the Holocaust, the most distinct aspect of Hitler’s National Socialism was his intense German nationalism.  That nationalism was expressed in aims to make Germany as nearly economically self-sufficient as possible.  To that end Hitler championed laborers and farmers and imposed regulations to insulate them from foreign competition.

This is precisely the intent of American labor unions: not only to keep out foreign competitors whose high-quality, lower-priced goods threaten the above-market labor union costs imposed upon American companies, but also to prevent domestic competition from lower-cost American companies that are not unionized.

It is true that labor unions have improved the lot of their members, bringing factory and mining employees into the economic middle class.  But they have done so at great expense to the remainder of the nation.

It’s not the improved lives of union members that is the evil necessarily associated with unionism.  It’s both the fact that improvement of union member status is a transfer payment from non-union employees and consumers that impels inflation, and that socialist regulation by the Federal government is essential to the process of union extortion.  From another aspect, it is simply Marxian class warfare in which labor unions are a favored class.

Our Democrat/Socialist Congress, kowtowing today to labor union pressure, is planning to revoke NAFTA provisions allowing two-way trucking trade between Mexico and the United States.  In a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States diplomatically describes the issues.

Teamsters’ union efforts to bar Mexican trucks from the United States come at the same time that unions are working to eliminate secret ballots in companies where they attempt to organize workers.  And don’t forget the strangulation of GM, Ford, and Chrysler by overly expensive benefits packages and the insane Jobs Bank program under which GM pays full wages and benefits to tens of thousands of laid-off workers who never have to seek other jobs and who produce not a dime’s worth of output for the economy. 

Remember also that by the late 1950s, when Japanese and German manufacturers began penetrating the American market with steel, TV sets, electrical appliances, automobiles, and heavy equipment, labor unions had inflated the wages and benefits of unskilled labor to such heights that American manufacturers were unable to compete.  The devastation was so complete that, by the late 1970s, the Midwestern industrial heartland had become known as “the rust bowl” because of the abandoned factories that had become the most prominent features of the landscape. 

When labor unions raise their pay and benefits to such high levels, non-union American workers make up the difference with lower pay and benefits.  More insidiously, above-market union labor costs impart a steady inflationary pressure to the entire economy, in effect taking money out of everyone else’s pockets.  Unions impose cost-of-living adjustments in their contracts to offset the inflation that they create.  This keeps them ahead of inflation, while the general public find the purchasing power of their wages steadily diminishing.

Democrat-Socialists support labor union extortion for two reasons.  First, unions are, along with the class-action tort litigation bar, the largest source of campaign funds and free get-out-the-vote labor for Democrat-Socialists.  Second, labor unions are quintessential exemplars of socialism in action, Marx’s proletariat working to overthrow capitalism.

This political and economic poison was first administered to the nation by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s New Deal (which President Obama apparently aims to repeat).   John T. Flynn, a liberal economist and syndicated columnist at the time, described it this way in The Roosevelt Myth:

There were men around the President at this time who saw the tremendous possibilities of organizing labor as a political force.  They knew the history of the labor movement in England, which had grown so great that it completely wiped out the old Liberal party as a political force.  They believed that something like that could be done in America and they wanted the President to use his vast powers and great funds to encourage the formation of labor into a great political force.  To do this it was necessary to enlarge the field of labor organization.

Those socialistic ideological intentions were implemented by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, popularly known as the Wagner Act. 

Labor unions today are urging their Democrat/Socialist allies in Congress to carry on the socialist tradition by supporting new measures to transfer wealth from the rest of us to their coffers and to the campaign funds of the Democrat/Socialist Party.