Friday, March 20, 2009

Obama Makes Orwell's "1984" Come True in "2009"

President Obama IS NOT a defender of freedom. The sooner we all realize this the sooner we can get back out country. The economist George Reisman has an article at his blog explaining Obama's fondness for collective bargaining and Unions in general. He explains that this is COERCION pure and unadulterated. We must understand whats going on before we can know the solution to our erosion of freedom. "The Employee Free Choice Act" is Orwellian double speak and is straight out of the famous novel "1984". But we are living Rand's novel - "Atlas Shrugged". Pick up a copy of both and you'll know what I mean.

...The reader should keep in mind the coercive nature of collective bargaining. Then he should consider Mr. Obama’s observation that “If you’ve got workers who have decent pay and benefits [as the alleged result of collective bargaining], they’re also customers for business.” This statement makes about as much sense as declaring that people who are successful at sticking up gas stations are also customers of gas stations.

Moreover, the workers who are unemployed by collective bargaining are not customers of business, or not very good customers (they can’t afford to be). And the products offered by business to its customers are poorer and more expensive because of collective bargaining. This is something, it must be stressed, that reduces the buying power of the wages of workers throughout the economic system, i.e., reduces what economists call their “real wages.” Mr. Obama needs to forget the nonsense he believes about collective bargaining and paying extortionate wages somehow benefiting business and learn to understand how it harms wage earners, how it harms every wage earner who must pay more and get less as the result of legally enforced collective bargaining. He must learn to understand how it also harms every worker who must earn less as the result of being displaced by collective bargaining from the better paying jobs he could have had if wage rates in those lines had not been driven artificially still higher by collective bargaining and thus reduced the number of workers who could be employed in them and thereby forced those workers into lower paying jobs.

Unfortunately, it does not seem very likely that Mr. Obama will ever learn any of this. He appears to be so charmed by the use of compulsion and coercion that he and his supporters in Congress are ready to unleash a reign of outright mass intimidation against American workers.

In a bow to Orwell’s 1984 and its world filled with such slogans as “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “love is hate,” Obama and his henchmen are readying “the Employee Free Choice Act.” This is an act designed precisely to end employee free choice, by depriving workers of the benefit of a secret ballot in deciding whether or not they want to join a union. In the words of The Times article, this is “a bill that unions hope will add millions of new members by giving workers the right to union recognition as soon as a majority of employees at a workplace sign pro-union cards. The bill would take away management’s ability to insist on a secret ballot election.”

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