Commentary: Public Sector Unions Are a Growing Threat to Taxpayers

Following the resolution of the six-week United Auto Workers strike last month and the ensuing glut of news coverage, one could be forgiven for believing that private sector unions were experiencing a generational comeback the likes of which haven’t been seen since their halcyon days of the 1950s.

The reality, however, couldn’t be further from the truth: union participation in the private sector is now a tiny sliver of the overall employment picture in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unionization rate of private-sector workers currently sits below 6% at just under 7 million workers nationwide – down from 17 million in 1950.

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Commentary: Bread and Circuses, Then and Now

For decades, I taught a course in European economic history that stressed the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath and spent a couple of lectures talking about the Roman Empire and other ancient civilizations. The Roman Empire lasted over 500 years (by some accounts, even longer) but ultimately declined and fell. Is America and its world leadership (rather than “empire”) undergoing a remarkably similar decline? Is history eerily repeating itself well over a millennium later? 

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Commentary: FDR Did Not Create America’s Middle Class

This week I have a question from Ryan who asks about economic development in America. Ryan says,

I was having a discussion with an acquaintance the other day over the causes of the post WW2 economy, more specifically why the middle class grew so large compared to the past and today. My claim was that the war devastated other countries’ industries, forcing other countries to buy from the US. This combined with the return of many men from the military to the workforce was the primary cause.

He claims that while those produced a large GDP, it did not explain why the middle class grew. Instead he advocates that the primary cause was the FDR policies of wealth redistribution, high tax rates, and strong labor unions. As such, he advocates for a return to those policies today.

What would be your perspective on this and where might one go to further research it?

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Commentary: Election Integrity and the Jim Crow Slur

Person with mask on at a computer.

Not too long ago, a good friend of mine took umbrage at a Facebook post that compared a proposed “vaccination passport” to the requirement that Jews in Nazi Germany carry papers identifying them as such. As a Jew, my friend argued that such a comparison trivialized the horrors of the Nazi regime that culminated in the Holocaust.

My friend’s objection was justified. But this same individual has not hesitated to join the president of the United States in comparing the recent Georgia voting law to Jim Crow. Anyone who makes such a claim has no idea of what Jim Crow entailed. Second only to slavery, the Jim Crow era represents the darkest period in U.S. racial history, far darker than Reconstruction or the decade that followed.

Indeed, the racial oppression, segregation, and violence that prevailed throughout the South during the era of Jim Crow in many respects exceeded that of the period of slavery. At least during slavery, there were free blacks in the South who, while denied most civil rights, were protected by laws that left them free to go about their business unmolested and did not prevent commercial interactions between the races.

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