FreedomTalks

The following letter was sent from a FreedomWorks member to a newspaper in Ohio today. I think he makes a great point.

I heard Senator DeWine say that he was proud of ‘protecting the steel industry.’  Is restricting free trade and free labor something our Senators should be proud of? Consider the letter below.

The Union Effect

Labor Unions cost this country jobs, eliminate fair competition for jobs, and lower our overall standard of living by dictating that nobody can work for less than an artificially high amount of compensation. This greed on the part of unions makes the goods the company produces harder to sell and limits the number of people who can enjoy them.

Some items are best made in the USA, some overseas. We have the ability to grow bananas in greenhouses and hire union banana pickers for $50 an hour compensation, but would anyone be able to afford the bananas they grow? Most Americans would lose the benefit of inexpensive bananas, and the unionized banana growing company will either go out of business or move its operations overseas where it is more cost effective to produce bananas. Apples, on the other hand, are inexpensive to grow domestically as long as there aren’t unionized apple pickers doing the picking. In that case, artificially high union wages would cause apples to be out of the reach of most consumers and they would quickly become a luxury item. Does that benefit the handful of union workers or the country as a whole?

Just like with fruit, sometimes it’s better to make CD players, TV’s, shoes, clothes, and toys in the USA, sometimes not. We all enjoy a higher standard of living because those items just mentioned are affordable, whether or not they are made domestically. If we were to ‘protect’ jobs and demand all those items be made at home, our incomes may go up, but the amount of goods that higher pay would net us would be far lower. Higher wages are nice, but not if they force the price of goods and services beyond their relative cost in today’s market.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 4:10 pm and is filed under States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.