It's very sad to watch an innocent human being suffer. It's dreadful to contemplate anyone's life being ruined. It's dreadful to contemplate even an imbecile's falling off a cliff or down a well. But the union members, their union leaders, the politicians who catered to them, the journalists, the writers, and the professors who provided the intellectual and cultural environment in which this calamity could take place — none of them were imbeciles. They all could have and should have known better.
What is happening is cruel justice, imposed by a reality that willfully ignorant people thought they could choose to ignore as long as it suited them: the reality that prosperity comes from the making of goods, not the making of work; that it comes from the doing of work, not from the shirking of it; that it comes from machines and methods of production that save labor, not the combating of those machines and methods; that it comes from the earning and reinvestment of profits not from seizure of those profits for the benefit of idlers, who do all they can to prevent the profits from being earned in the first place.
In sum, without the UAW, General Motors would not be faced with extinction. Instead, it would almost certainly be a vastly larger, far more prosperous company, producing more and better motor vehicles than ever before, at far lower costs of production and prices than it does today, and providing employment to hundreds of thousands more workers than it does today.
George Reisman, "
Where would General Motors be without the United Automobile Workers Union," Mises Daily
, Wednesday, April 19, 2006 (courtesy of the Ludwig von Mises Institute); copyright © 2006 George Reisman,
http://www.capitalism.net/.
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