Last time we went through the sort of dry section, which was just to go over some of the principles that are enshrined in law by certain pieces of legislation pertaining to labor unions.
And now I want to go into, you know, maybe some more arguments that might help to disabuse us of, you know, of myths that even free market people, I think, in the deep down have.
Does this really work? Don't we actually need this or that to protect workers?
Isn't it true that people had to work long hours in the past?
I want to try to address all that as best I can.
But just to recap from last time, the key thing that I want to note is that originally,
that is up until really the 1930s, you had a system of freedom of contract between workers and employers,
Lawyers, so that employer and employee alike were free to make and then to accept or to
reject any offer of remuneration.
With the 1930s comes the principle of an exclusive bargaining agent decided on by a majority
of the workers that would then be applied to all workers in that bargaining unit.
We get a legal order in which it becomes very difficult to stop union violence even while
it's underway.
Unions are very hard to impose injunctions to stop it. Employers have difficulty speaking against unionism or making statements about unionism around the time of the campaign for the certification election because then they can be accused, even under the 1947 amendments, of engaging in speech that involves threats of reprisal if the workers decide to choose for a union.
And by the way, also if they promise benefits to the workers, if the employer says that,
you know, look, I'll give you this wage increase right now, just don't unionize.
Well, needless to say, you get severely punished for that.
So the freedom of speech of employers is curtailed under this new order, this new legal order.
Employers can be found guilty of failing to bargain with this designated bargaining agent, this union.
In practice, what it has meant is that employers have come to the conclusion that the only way they can prove that they're bargaining in good faith is that they've had some give and take, so they begin by making absurdly unreasonable offers because they feel like that will then provoke bargaining.
Massive strikes, even dominated by complete strangers, who are in no way associated with a particular firm, become permitted, and strangers are permitted to come onto private property to agitate among the workers.
So this is definitely a very, very different legal order than had existed in the past.
Now two little points before I go on to my big point.
One little point is I want to make note of Morgan Reynolds who wrote a book called Making America Poorer
and the subtitle is The Cost of Labor Law. It's worth reading.
But he listed seven distinct ways in which he believed labor unionism imposed costs on the economy
because I didn't really develop that point too much before lunch. I gave some brief indication of it.
And by the way, if you want to get these points, you can either get Professor Reynolds' book,
which is out of print and difficult to find, or you can get my book, The Church and the Market,
which is in a second edition. My second printing has just come out.
That was the second annoying thing I've said all week.
My quote is, I think I have three more between now and the end.
Here's what they are. He says, number one, the redistribution of income from the general community
to Union Bureaucracies and their members.
Number two, he says the unemployment effects of unions,
which is naturally going to happen if you increase wages artificially,
less labor will be demanded.
The consequences of union wage inflexibilities over the business cycle,
so these union wage contracts make wages inflexible
even at times when wage flexibility seems to be called for
Number four, the cost of union work rules.
Union work rules would be things like...
I remember a situation where...
I can't remember if it was in college or where it was,
but any time somebody flipped over a cassette tape,
you had to have a guy from the labor union come in
and flip over the cassette tape for you.
You couldn't actually get up and flip it over.
Sometimes you get these bizarre rules that are inserted
Sometimes you get these bizarre rules that are inserted into labor contracts that lead to just bizarre inefficiencies and certainly that would be an example.
Or other union work rules would involve deliberately avoiding using labor-saving machinery because we want more workers.
By the way, in case there still is anybody, I'm sure not in this room, but anybody listening who is uncomfortable about labor-saving machinery,
I remember reading the Grapes of Wrath years ago, John Steinbeck.
There is a part where he goes on this little tangent about farm machinery
and how bad it is because it throws people out of work.
I always have to use this example in my classes to make sure they all understand this point.
I say, let's suppose you have an economy made up of four people
and three of them work at the post office, let's say.
So, like, all their work, three people, is to send letters to the other guy.
Okay, so there's a, so there's a, so I say to them, this is not a realistic scenario, but it nevertheless works.
And the other guy basically, you know, has an orange grove.
Well, let's suppose that the post office gets some of those, you know, stamp vending machines.
And to get, to buy stamps, you don't have to wait in line the more you just go to the machine.
I suppose that means that you now need only two people working at the post office, okay?
Well, that means that with two people working at the post office,
you can now produce the same amount that you did with three,
but now you've released one person to go out into the economy
and produce more things that we couldn't have had before
because he was wasting his life selling stamps to you.
Now he can go work in an orange grove or something
and increase the overall amount of wealth,
so there's no need for that third person to go up to that machine
And shake his fist at it and say, you, SOB, taking my stamp dispensing job away.
No, you should think in terms of all of society.
It's hard to do sometimes when you're the one who has to bear the burden of benefiting all of society.
But the point is that any alternative situation in which people start smashing machines,
or I'm entitled to sell stamps the rest of my life,
is just antisocial and interferes with the increase in everyone's standard of living.
The fifth one, the dynamic impact of unions in discouraging research and development, investment and entrepreneurship.
And he can give you examples of that.
Number six would be the direct costs of strikes, strike threats, negotiating costs, labor consultants,
national labor relations board elections, bureaucratic costs, grievance costs and related expenses.
And then finally, the political role of unions in increasing international trade barriers, which is well known, government spending and related forms of discoordination sustained by political action.
Okay, I'm going to come back to that sheet later.
My second small point before my large, but the first point was to go over what Reynolds points out are some of the deleterious effects of labor unions and exactly what they are.
The Theory of Money and Credit
It means that in labor relative to land, it's just an empirical fact, that labor is scarce relative to nature-given factors.
If this were not the case, we would have no unused or sub-marginal land.
If labor were just super-abundant, or at least abundant in relation to land, all land would be brought into use.
The very fact that some land and some resources remain untapped reflects the scarcity of labor,
which is to say that labor is too dear to be wasted on extracting resources or using land
whose returns would be lower than in some other area in which scarce labor is more urgently needed.
And also George Reisman notes this, I think it's a very good point.
Many of us would be happy to have the services of cooks, gardeners, personal secretaries and the like
but we're frustrated in this desire precisely because of the scarcity of labor.
Most of us cannot command the funds necessary to divert scarce labor away from other sectors of the economy
and toward the fulfillment of domestic labor and personal services for ourselves as individuals.
In addition, while it is possible for any given person to desire a supply of goods that could be produced only by the labor of many individuals,
on average, a person can of course never acquire more than the products of just one other person.
When the very young and the sick and infirm are allowed for, who can only be supported by the labor of others, it turns out that for each person who consumes, there is, on average, substantially less than the labor of one person available to produce, and then he goes on to provide much more evidence of the ineradicable scarcity of labor, including the fact that as workers grow wealthier and more comfortable, they begin to desire more and more leisure and thereby wish to supply less and less labor.
really is in fact true and a defensible statement that there is such a thing as a scarcity of labor.
Now typically the way a lot of market economists explain, see I have bottled water here, I forgot about this,
sort of rude to drink water right out of the bottle, so especially like on camera,
I'm not rude, but not sophisticated like drinking out of a glass, so I'll drink out of the glass.
Now, if only I had one of those little umbrellas, then I'd be really sophisticated.
Like Steve Martin wanted in The Jerk. Be somebody!
All right, let's just move on.
I watched The Jerk recently with my wife. I'd seen it in college.
We'd watched like a TV-edited version of it over and over when there was nothing else on.
And then years passed, I was in grad school, years passed, and then I was with my wife recently and said,
Oh, this is a great movie, we've got to watch it.
I put it on, I totally forgot how stupid this movie is.
Oh my gosh, I was, just the whole movie, I just wanted to cringe and leave.
So anyway, if you're watching, dear, I'm sorry, sorry we had to watch that.
Anyway, when it comes to labor unionism, typically market economists will argue along these lines.
They'll say that it's natural for people's well-being to increase on the free market as laborers
because there's competition among employers for this scarce labor.
And so if somebody is employing me and I'm making pentium processors and you're paying me a dollar a day,
well, the argument goes that there'll be another employer somewhere who will bid me away,
who also wants to have somebody like me and will say well I'll pay you two dollars a day
and so then the other employer has to bid up so that eventually the argument goes that
through in effect a kind of labor arbitrage eventually the price of my labor is bid up to the point
you know more or less at my discounted marginal value product so that it gets to the point where
you know I'm in effect being employed more or less at the level of at a wage that more or less
That's something like the argument that you hear market economists make.
Certainly there's something to that, I think.
But there's another way of looking at this wage question, I think.
And again, I say this as a layman.
But I'm quite taken by George Riesman's explanation of why it is that laborers tend,
through the natural workings of the market, to grow wealthier and wealthier.
In fact, what he's going to argue is that there is a natural tendency for all real incomes
and the natural tendency for all real incomes to increase over time on an unhampered market.
So what I'd like to do now is to look at that for a moment
and give this alternative explanation as to why it is that people, in fact,
workers included, tend to do better and better over time in an unhampered market.
First of all, Reisman points out that let's bear in mind that his theory is not going to be that easy to see
...place in our economy, because we have an economy with an expanding money supply, a very active Federal Reserve system,
and so we've grown up in an economy in which we think it's just normal that things get more expensive all the time,
like this is just like a fact of nature, things always get more expensive and that's just the way life is.
But it need not be so, of course the price level in America was consistently falling for a century and a half,
really from the 18th century, if you don't include wartime,
And that's because if you have a more or less fixed supply of money,
and the gold supply is more or less fixed,
I mean, at least compared with the money supply since going off gold,
if you have a basically fixed money supply,
but you have an economy that gets progressively more productive
and it produces more and more goods all the time,
well, then that constant amount of money will come to command
correspondingly more and more goods.
Whereas we live in an economy where both wages and prices just seem to be going up
Supply.
The key to the process whereby the unhampered market increases the average standard of living
is business investment in capital goods that increase the productivity of labor,
which is to say, how much each worker is capable of producing.
A forklift, for example, makes it possible for a worker to move and stack far more pallets than before
and to reach heights that would have been impossible with his bare hands.
Other kinds of machinery can multiply the efficiency of a single worker many times over,
sometimes by orders of magnitude.
The amount of goods the economy is capable of producing rises and at times even explodes
and this is how wealth is created.
As a result of capital investment, firms can now produce many, many times more goods than
before and at considerably lower cost.
Thanks to the pressures of market competition, firms pass on these cost cuts to consumers
in the form of lower prices, better quality merchandise or a combination of both.
The ordinary person's standard of living increases, therefore, not because government takes from
the rich to give to him, or because labor unions struggle with employers to win him
concessions.
His standard of living increases because on the unhampered market, business firms are
in a position to invest in machinery that makes it possible for more and more goods
to be produced with fewer and fewer hands, thereby increasing the overall amount of material
goods available and rendering them less and less expensive.
It is the productivity of labor that determines the supply of consumer goods relative to the supply of labor, and thus the prices of consumers' goods relative to wage rates.
This does not mean that we will run out of jobs. As long as human wants remain even partially unfulfilled, there will never be a shortage of jobs.
Research of Jobs
Now, Riesman sometimes puts this sort of playfully and he'll say, you know, look, I mean, as
a, like right now, you know, most people would like to have, you know, you'd like to have
your own gardener or you'd like to have two cars or better cars than you have now or a
yacht or a plane or a yacht from which you can launch your plane, you know, he says,
he says, you know, like in other words, you can always imagine at least some material
improvement that, you know, not everybody needs to have that sort of thing, but in other
In other words, given where we are now, and given a society where everybody is launching his plane from his own yacht, there's quite a ways to go.
In some fields, such as agriculture, the increase in output made possible by productivity gains will not be met by a proportionate increase in consumption.
For example, we increase the productivity of agriculture such that we can produce ten times as much food.
It doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to want to eat ten times as much.
In that case, we're always going to want to shift resources out of agriculture,
because otherwise we're just going to be drowning in rotting food.
So in that case, even though it'll get more productive,
we'll probably have fewer people employed in agriculture, as has in fact happened.
But this released labor is now available to produce other goods that we could not have had before.
This is labor that had previously been tied up in agriculture and so we have greater wealth, but in other fields like automobile manufacturing, productivity increases will make possible a mass market in a product that had once been a mere luxury and will therefore attract more employment. In both cases, the great mass of consumers are enormously benefited.
Now, this is not the description of events that you find in a typical history book.
Instead, we hear, and I remember this from junior high onward, that massive redistribution of wealth from rich to poor was morally necessary and economically indispensable in order to improve the lot of the least wealthy.
But that kind of policy could have done absolutely nothing to improve the standard of living of American workers.
Riesman's description as follows. He says,
If one person in a thousand, say, is a wealthy capitalist and eats twice as much and has 20 times the clothing and furniture as an average person,
hardly any noticeable improvement for the average person could come from dividing the capitalist's greater-than-average consumption by 999 and redistributing it.
So at best, this kind of wealth redistribution would have been useless in eradicating the poverty of the past.
But at worst, by discouraging the wealthy from investing, by in effect threatening to confiscate their wealth again in the future,
this approach would only have inhibited the process of wealth creation,
and diminished or halted altogether the progress toward a higher standard of living
that would otherwise have occurred for the great mass of the population.
Now, this is a very brief overview of this.
Isn't it true, though, that workers in the past had to work very long hours?
Isn't there some kind of intervention that's necessary to alleviate that problem?
And certainly that is true. I wouldn't want to be a laborer in the year 1870.
By today's standards, people in the 19th century worked an exhausting schedule.
But again, when output per worker is miserably low,
But again, when output per worker is miserably low, then a supply of consumer goods that
most people consider adequate requires people to work correspondingly long hours to produce
them all. I mean, if all the machines in our society were suddenly to break down, but yet
nevertheless we all continued working 40-hour weeks, we'd probably all die. Or at the very
least we'd be living in huts or we'd be scrounging for worms to eat or something. I mean, it
It would be difficult if you thought all we need is the aggregate amount of work that can be produced by everybody working 40 hours.
Well, 40 hours working with everybody's bare hands would not produce anything like the goods that we've taken for granted.
So you need the machines. The machines are the key here.
So this is, this and not the wickedness of big business accounts for the low standard of living and long hours of work that existed in the past.
As the productivity of labor increases and with it the level of real wages, people can
begin to opt for additional leisure rather than continue to work the long hours of the
past. So without the need for any government legislation, a situation will eventually arise
in which employers find offering correspondingly fewer hours to be in their own economic interest
and will offer them without the need for coercion. If someone who once worked 80 hours per week
now wishes to work only 60, that is three-fourths as many hours, and is willing to accept a
wage at or less than three-fourths that of his previous wage as a premium on the leisure
he will now enjoy, it makes perfect sense for his employer to offer these terms.
To the extent that maximum hours legislation corresponded with people's desire to work
fewer hours, it was superfluous since such an outcome would have come about by this means.
But to the extent that such legislation was economically premature, forcing fewer hours
on Workers who needed the wages of their longer hours in order to maintain what they considered an adequate standard of living, it harmed people, it harmed the people who were supposed to help.
And this is true in the same way for legislation to improve working conditions.
Obviously, people want to have improved working conditions, but there are other considerations here.
Now, improvements in working conditions that pay for themselves in terms of less workplace damage and disruption,
Perhaps, better morale among the workers will be readily adopted by any profit-seeking enterprise because it's in their interest to do so.
But even improvements that do not pay for themselves will still be adopted in cases in which the wage premium that would have to be offered to attract workers in the absence of the improvement would be higher than the cost of simply introducing the improvement.
So, for example, the only non-arbitrary way of introducing an improvement like climate-controlled facilities, therefore,
and the only way of doing so that does not price workers out of jobs entirely
or impoverish society out of proportion to the satisfaction
derived by workers now enjoying climate control is by paying attention to the market.
Everyone knows that certain lines of work, because of their difficulty
or because of undesirable or unpleasant aspects of the labor involved,
carry a wage premium to attract sufficient workers
by compensating them for these negative factors.
As time goes on, and more and more places become climate-controlled,
the wage premium for non-climate-controlled workplaces will rise.
The wage differential that the non-climate-controlled workplace must pay
in order to attract workers away from employers with climate-controlled facilities
may eventually reach a level at which it would be less expensive for the firm
simply to install climate control,
rather than to go on paying higher wages than their competitors who provide it.
The market thus allows for rational allocation of resources and helps to ensure that improvements in workplace conditions
do not come at the expense of other goods that workers and consumers value more.
After all, there is no logical limit to the improvements in working conditions that could be brought about.
We would all enjoy having five-hour lunch breaks, the service of a masseuse, and an office with a view of Niagara Falls.
But any improvement in working conditions must come at the expense of something else that must now be foregone.
and there is no way, in isolation from market exchange, that these foregone opportunities can be rationally compared.
So this is why taxes on business and capital are so foolish and counterproductive.
Since these taxes hamper business investment, which as we've seen is precisely what raises our standard of living,
to impose them is in and of itself destructive.
Now the vast bulk of high school teachers spend their time condemning the wickedness of businessmen and the wealthy
and describe taxation as a righteous method for redistributing the supposedly ill-gotten gains of the wealthy to the oppressed poor.
To put it kindly, such people have not the faintest idea of how wealth is created
and their envy-driven policy proposals inevitably make society poorer than it would otherwise be.
Now, let's recall the point about labor union work rules.
Labor unions are notorious for opposing the introduction of labor-saving machinery,
since they believe, sometimes rightly, that it will lead to the unemployment of some of their members.
But such machinery, in the steel industry, let's say,
allows the same amount of output to be produced by fewer hands,
thereby releasing into the economy a supply of labor that can now be applied
to the production of goods that we could not have had before,
because the requisite labor had been tied up in the production of steel.
This is an example again of how wealth is created.
The additional goods produced by the additional labor have the happy result of raising real wages,
that is the purchasing power of wages,
since an increase in the supply of goods available will increase real wages
by endowing all real incomes with greater purchasing power.
Thus, by opposing the introduction of labor-saving machinery,
labor unions directly sabotage the very mechanism by which real wages are raised.
Okay, well that's a little bit of theory on this and I'd like to look at some specifics from history.
There's a very interesting, along these lines, a very interesting chart in Tom DiLorenzo's book,
How Capitalism Saved America, and he and I seem to be in some kind of a mutual help society
The Theory of Money and Credit
What Tom has done is to list the number of minutes of labor that it took in each of those years for you to earn enough money to buy the product.
And what he's showing is the incredible increase in productivity over the years that's made it possible for people to produce so much in such a little time
that they can command so many goods in the marketplace on the basis of a very short amount of time spent in labor.
So, for example, we have a half gallon of milk, well, I don't know, 2005, we have to remeasure this one, but nevertheless, 1900 would have taken you 56 minutes of labor, 1950, 16 minutes of labor, and 1999, 7 minutes.
And then he goes on in this regard, there are some of these, the data is not available from the year 1900.
But, for example, chocolate bars I'm going to ignore for reasons I've already mentioned earlier.
We're not going to discuss chocolate bars, but a pair of jeans.
Nine hours in 1900 to work to get a pair of jeans.
Four hours in 1950, three hours in 1999.
A three-pound chicken, okay, we're going to imagine this as a skinless chicken
with nothing fun, no cheese on it, no bacon.
1900, 2 hours and 40 minutes for a 3-pound chicken.
1950, an hour and 11 minutes for a 3-pound chicken.
1999, 24 minutes, baby, you got yourself a 3-pound chicken.
100 kilowatts of electricity, 107 hours and 17 minutes in the year 1900.
Is it even worth it at that point?
and then 1952 hours, 1999 14 minutes, and then finally a three-minute coast-to-coast phone call.
In 1950, you'd have to work an hour and 44 minutes to be able to make a three-minute coast-to-coast phone call.
In 1999, you had to work for two minutes. So, you know, there you go, two minutes, three minutes phone call.
And actually, even better, since my wife and I, we use IDT, long-distance, we pay a flat $40 a month and we get free everything, free interstate, free within state, I got like a hundred bucks for that.
No, that's not true, but I mean, you're crazy not to be using this thing, like my friends call me and I say, let me call you back, it's free, and they're going, whoa!
So I'm getting lots of calls these days, all kinds of calls from people, because I call them back for free.
So that's quite impressive, I think this is where you take some of this theory and you show that it actually does correspond to something in the real world.
Well, Tom, in the actual text of this chapter, his chapter is called, How Capitalism Enriched the Working Class,
he points out interesting examples of other products, he says,
When portable radios first appeared in American stores, the average American worker had to
work 13 hours to buy one. Now it's only one hour. It used to be that in the 20s, if you
wanted a nice men's suit, you had to do the equivalent of 79 hours of labor. Now it's
less than half that. At the beginning of the 20th century, the typical American family
spent three quarters of its income on food, clothing and shelter. Today it spends about
In 1908, the typical American worker had to work two years to earn enough money to buy an average quality car.
Today, a Ford Taurus costs an American worker about eight months of labor.
But the car is a technological miracle compared with the cars of yesterday,
with standard air conditioning, power seats, safety devices of all kinds, cruise control,
In 1970, an IBM mainframe computer sold for around $4.7 million.
Today, a personal computer that operates 13 times faster goes for under $1,000.
And then Tom goes on to discuss the oft-debated question,
what is the value of a personal computer?
What is the value of a personal computer?
And then Tom goes on to discuss the oft-debated question of has American leisure time increased because there are some scholars who argue that we're working more than ever and there's much less leisure but some of that is just playing with the data a little bit and others neglects to note the fact that now that we have all these labor-saving devices from dishwashers to a million other things, in fact that's another factor that contributes to our leisure and much as I hate
The fact that I can make a call on my way somewhere as I'm walking down the street, which means that when I get home I don't have to waste my time on that, I can be doing other things, this actually does mean that we can be more productive and enjoy more leisure time.
Oh, gosh, I had to really bite my tongue, grit my teeth to say that because, gosh, for some reason I know I read Jeff Tucker's beautiful piece, but I still think about people who are in 7-Eleven buying bread and they're calling home.
And they're calling home. What is this that urgent? You've got to be on the phone right now while you're buying a loaf of bread.
But anyway, if Jeff were here, he'd correct me. But that's his own fault once again for being out of town.
Well, let's look at a couple of episodes from American labor history that are sometimes cited as just glorious moments that everyone should commemorate and remember and honor.
And, you know, actually look at them in some detail and see if the facts measure up to the myth.
Let's start, for example, with the Haymarket incident, which is a terribly tragic event, certainly.
But it's sometimes portrayed as a great, you know, glorious moment in the history of American Unionism.
And it's not clear why that should be.
The major meeting that was called on May 4th when the Haymarket incident took place
was not even called by labor unions. It was called by so-called anarchists, left-wing anarchists, so-called anarchists called it.
And, in fact, these were people who had been denounced by labor union leaders.
So, first of all, just on the face of it, it's not clear why this would be a glorious labor union moment when labor unions were not even supporting these people.
But, as I say, let's look in more detail.
There's a very useful article by Charles Baird in which he does a revisionist study of this incident,
of the Homestead Strike of 1892 that we'll look at next, and the Pullman Strike of 1894.
You can find it in the Cato Journal, 1990.
Now, for those of you who don't have the entire print run of the Cato Journal in your homes,
is there anyone who fits that description in this room?
Then you can nevertheless find it online. You just do a Google search for, what was it?
Oh, it's called, it's called, Labor Law Reform, Lessons from History.
It's actually in the bibliography to my book, but you'll notice that my book doesn't cover any of that material.
So what's it doing in the bibliography? Well, originally there was a labor union chapter.
That was cut for space reasons, but the bibliography stayed the same.
So sometimes there are items in the bibliography on subjects that I don't even remotely touch upon.
But anyway, this one I highly recommend because it's an example of how labor history should be done.
It should be done, first of all, by somebody like Charles Baird who understands the economics of labor.
And secondly, it should be done primarily with the use of the most primary sources you can get your hands on to try to reconstruct what happened.
Because the example of Haymarket is a good example of how very often these stories of labor union triumphs or tragedies
are typically distorted in a standard history.
Well, basically, we start the story of what happened at Haymarket,
which is talking about Chicago.
We start with the McCormick Reaper Company in February 1886.
The incident at Haymarket takes place May 4, 1886.
So a little earlier that year, there had been a lockout at the McCormick Reaper Company.
The company had basically shut down in anticipation of a strike.
There was a strike threat looming and the strike was not actually a strike about wages and hours and working conditions.
The strike was about whether the McCormick Reaper Company had the right to employ five non-union workers.
This was a unionized plant by and large and McCormick, though, had had five non-union workers
The Strikers, and they claimed they have the right to negotiate with anyone on whatever terms they want but at the same time they were negotiating with this union that represented the vast bulk of the workers so they felt that they were being contractually honest and reasonable but the Strikers said, they were of the opinion that no they should not hire anyone except union workers okay well as the month of February progressed eventually the McCormick Company
and at least a group, a committee of union men, announced that they were prepared to reopen,
basically on the terms offered by McCormick. They were going to reopen on March 1st.
But according to the New York Times, another group of unionists at McCormick,
and these are the words of the New York Times, intimated very strongly
that they would make trouble for those who do attempt to resume labor.
Well, March 1st comes along and a great many strikers come out, crowds of them.
And so, of the 1,000 McCormick workers who had initially indicated a desire to return to work,
initially only 150 actually dared to do it.
Well, once local police had managed to disperse some of the rather intimidating crowds that had gathered around McCormick,
A couple hundred other former McCormick workers returned to work and within a couple of months the remainder of workers, for the remainder of positions, McCormick had simply hired replacements and that was really the end of that.
And there really hadn't been a notable amount of violence in any of this process. That's sort of the background for this.
Now on May 1st an entirely unrelated event takes place.
For two years, basically, labor unionists had been struggling for the eight-hour day.
Since May of 1884, there had been a campaign going on saying that for the next two years we were going to agitate for the eight-hour day.
And let's put in parentheses here that when they say the eight-hour day, the eight-hour day movement was saying that we want to work eight hours a day for ten hours of pay.
8 Hours of Work for 10 Hours of Pay
I still haven't gotten on board for the 8-hour day, then we go on nationwide strikes
and refuse to go back to work until the 8-hour day is granted.
Well, by the time you get to May 1st, 1886, a great many firms have in fact granted the 8-hour day.
And interestingly, the McCormick Reaper Company was granting the 8-hour day at about this time.
But not all firms by any means had, so the strikes began, the general strikes began.
And in Chicago in particular, you see people particularly working in lumber and other areas
were going on this major eight-hour day strike that began on May 1st, 1886.
Okay, so they go on strike, a bunch of workers.
The vast majority of the people who are striking in favor of the eight-hour day beginning on May 1st
are not people who had ever at any time worked at the McCormick Reaper Company.
Company. There is practically no connection whatsoever between what we looked at with
what happened at McCormick and this long scheduled rally on May 1st. They're entirely disparate
events. Yet, as that event unfolds, there comes to be a connection between the two.
Because at the rally for the eight hour day and at some of these rallies, May 1st you
get a series of rallies, May 2nd is a Sunday where things are quiet, then May 3rd things
Let's get started up again.
You begin to get some very inflammatory speeches being delivered
that are not entirely related to the 8-hour day issue.
So, for example, one speaker who represented something called the Central Labor Union,
speaking to this group, again, which had practically no connection,
I mean, in effect, a totally negligible connection to McCormick,
reminded workers that, you know, right here in our midst,
There's a plant that hired replacement workers, that hired scabs during a strike, and we should punish them for that.
Now that has nothing to do with the eight-hour day, it just has to do with labor frustration.
So a labor union figure from the Central Labor Union named Fritz Schmidt said this at the rally,
On to McCormick's and let us run every one of the damned scabs out of the city.
It is they who are taking the bread from you, your wives and your children.
On to them, blow up the factory, strike for your freedom.
And if the armed murderers of the law interfere, shoot them down as you would the scabs.
Kind of an inflammatory speech.
Well, in the midst of this type of speech being delivered...
And by the way, again, that comes right out of the New York Times, recapping that speech.
Right around the time these speeches are being delivered, the bell sounds for the end of the work day over at McCormick.
And so having been, in effect, whipped into a frenzy over McCormick being a uniquely wicked employer,
the New York Times reports that thousands of workers from this particular demonstration stormed over to McCormick.
Now other eyewitness testimonies have the figure much lower.
I've seen as low as 200, but the point is that at least some number of people ran over to McCormick armed with stones to start pelting the scabs with, the scabs over at McCormick.
The result was that you had a very ugly confrontation with the McCormick workers having to run back into the plant for their own safety,
and so they were having, so they were having rocks whipped at them and then the rocks are being thrown through the windows of the plant and eventually the police arrived and you know attempted to restore order they fired their guns trying to just get the crowd to disperse but eventually they actually ended up killing at least four people who were at least four of the people from that other rally who would run over there. The workers themselves then began
and to open fire back, but ultimately it was viewed by some of the anarchist types as a massacre by the police.
But let's bear in mind here, because the way it's often described,
certainly these four people shouldn't have been killed, obviously,
but the way this is often described is that you could be easily forgiven for believing,
reading the standard account of this, there was a strike going on at the McCormick plant
and the police came and started shooting them.
But in fact, not only was that not the case, the plant had been operating for a couple of months with basically no violence,
but also the people involved over there were not even McCormick workers.
They were workers from a completely unrelated rally.
Well, the next day there was a meeting held at Haymarket and there were flyers distributed to try to get people to show up.
Not as many showed up as they wanted, but some of these flyers were distributed, as I say, by so-called anarchists.
And one such flyer read in big letters, revenge, working men to arms.
And it read in part, if you are men, if you are the sons of your grandsires who have shed their blood to free you,
then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you.
To arms we call you, to arms.
Another hand-bill read,
Attention, working men, great mass meeting tonight at 7 o'clock at the Haymarket.
Good speakers will be present to denounce the latest atrocious act of the police,
the shooting of our fellow workmen yesterday afternoon.
Working men, arm yourselves and appear in full force.
Well, as I say, this May 4th meeting was not called by the Knights of Labor
or the American Federation of Labor.
It was called by anarchist groups
from which these other labor organizations had sought to differentiate themselves.
Well, at this meeting there were, of course, still more inflammatory speeches made.
And at the moment that the police, late at night, around 10 o'clock at night,
demanded that people disperse, that the meeting cease and everyone go home,
a bomb exploded.
And to this day, no one knows exactly who it was who dropped this bomb.
But in the chaos that ensued, in the hysteria that ensued, a number of anarchists were rounded up and accused of the crime.
Some of them were, in fact, several of them were even executed.
And in subsequent years, the governor actually went back and looked at the evidence and said these people were railroaded.
So any of them who were in jail, he let them go.
But, of course, the executed people were already dead at that point.
But the significance of all this, as Baird says, is it may be that these anarchists were treated very badly.
You know, there was no real evidence against them, other than the fact that they had given inflammatory speeches.
But he says, in what way can this incident be viewed as a glorious moment in the history of American labor unionism,
when the anarchists were not involved in the labor union movement.
They detested the labor union movement.
Basically, the reason that Marxists detest the labor union movement has nothing to do with it.
And, in fact, basically what it amounts to is that it started off when a bunch of non-MacCormac people went and started throwing rocks at peaceful workers.
I mean, what particularly is glorious about this is what Baird wants to ask, and it's a reasonable question.
But still more dramatic, though, is what happened in 1892 in the Homestead strike.
This is the Homestead, the Carnegie Steel Works in Homestead, Pennsylvania.
in Pennsylvania. It was a very important facility for the production of steel.
I mean, it was tremendously efficient, much more so than comparable European plants.
And there's a historic strike that occurs there in 1892.
And again, the standard account has it that, again, this is a glorious moment for organized labor,
In 1889, there was a strike at the Homestead plant, the Carnegie Steel Works there, and during that strike, strikers were assaulting people, there was property destruction, the sheriff of Allegheny County was not able to control the strike.
In order to control the strikers, basically anybody who might have been able to help him on the force, they were all too afraid to do anything.
And so it's not surprising then that the Carnegie Steelworks at Homestead drew a conclusion from this.
We cannot rely on the public authorities to defend us.
So if something should happen again in the future, if there should be labor unrest in the future,
and some alternative means of protecting person and property.
Okay, now we fast forward to 1892, the year of the strike.
There had been, for several years, a wage agreement with the workers at Homestead.
And that wage agreement, it had involved a sliding scale in the sense that the wage that the worker was paid
would in some way be proportionate to the price of steel at that time.
So, in a certain sense the idea, more or less, was that it's profit sharing, so that if steel is very expensive, then we get a higher wage.
Steel goes down, to a certain extent we get a lower wage, but if steel goes below $22 per ton, then our wage cannot go down any lower than that.
Even if it went down to $18, $17, our wage would stay at the $22 level. That was the agreement.
Okay, that was set to expire in July of 1892, so now you've got to renegotiate.
Well, the price of steel had been declining, and the homestead plant was finding that it would be difficult for them,
given that the price of steel was at $22.50 per ton, to keep $22 as that low point would have been difficult for them.
So they wanted to negotiate that point, how would the sliding scale work under the new conditions?
All right, so the company and the workers are negotiating back and forth.
There were several different unions represented at this plan.
Now, Frank Taussig, who many of you may know from his tariff history of the United States,
said this in an article he wrote in 1893.
He said,
The leading workmen received very large earnings indeed, $6, $8, even $10 per working day.
Obviously, this is not $2,005, needless to say.
Well, by the time of July 1892, it was clear that the two sides were not going to reach an agreement.
In particular, it was the amalgamated iron and steel workers.
And they represented about 800 of the 3,800 workers at the plant.
They were not accepting the new offer and they threatened a strike in that month.
And in fact they went ahead with it.
They went ahead with the strike.
But it wasn't just the 800 who belonged to this recalcitrant union.
Basically all 3,800 workers went on strike.
And it seemed to the folks at Homestead that intimidation must have been used here.
How would you be able to get all 3,800 workers to go on strike when 3,000 of them were perfectly
happy with the deal?
How did they do that?
And so they were convinced, both Carnegie, who was not present, and the guy who was actually
running the homestead plant, Henry Clay Frick, was of the belief that there must have been
intimidation used.
Well, regardless, whether there was or wasn't, it would be hard to get to the bottom of that
at that point.
But the strike went on.
And so the 3800 workers basically ceased to work, ceased working.
And Carnegie himself, when he got word of this, was stunned that his workers had gone,
all of them had gone on strike.
He was of the opinion that he had modern facilities, that he had reasonable safety precautions
in place, given that steel production is inherently an extremely dangerous line of work.
He thought he had been more than reasonable to his employees and he was quite taken aback
Well, the strikers now form what they call an advisory committee and this advisory committee now begins to in effect exercise the powers of government in Homestead.
This advisory committee surrounded the Homestead plant, would not allow basically anyone other than company officers entrance and they made it clear they were trying to prevent non-union workers from getting into the plant.
They would stop and question strangers, people they didn't recognize, going into the plant.
So, in early July, 300 guards from the so-called Pinkerton Detective Agency were dispatched.
The Pinkertons were a private organization that would sometimes be dispatched in situations like this
where the public authority is helpless to do anything,
300 Pinkerton guards set out on a couple of barges along the river heading toward the
Carnegie steelworks at Homestead.
So there's a docking site, in other words, on the property for the barges.
The striking workers caught wind of this, that these several hundred Pinkerton guards
When the boats were on their way, and a mob of thousands began to rush over to the docking site.
When the boats finally got to the docking site, the mob, in fact, greeted them by letting the Pinkerton Detective Agency guards know that they really were not welcome there.
The way they let them know that they were not welcome there was that, for example, when
some of the Pinkerton guards tried to disembark and actually come ashore, along with the leader
of these guards, Captain Hinde, we get from a modern historian this description of what
took place.
Three strikers ran forward, two grabbed the end of the gangplank while the third deliberately
As Hinde was trying to shove the prone man aside, the latter pulled a revolver and shot him through the thigh.
The heavy cartridge knocked him over backward.
A torrent of gunfire swept the men on the plank.
Hinde was hit again. Another guard named Klein was killed instantly.
Four of the others were wounded.
Well, the Pinkertons hadn't even fired at this point, had not fired a shot at all.
But at this point, given that one of them has now been killed,
In the beginning, the strikers were killed, several injuries, the mob retreated, but temporarily, because ultimately all day long, the Pinkerton guards who are still on board the boats are being fired upon.
And the way that the strikers are going after these Pinkerton guards changes over the course of the day.
First they fire cannons at them, hoping to sink them.
Then they try to set the barges on fire.
And then they try to use dynamite on them.
Now again, there are some sort of sticklers who would say that this is not appropriate behavior toward fellow human beings.
I think people who say that are just oppressors of the working class.
Well, this advisory committee now, which again is sort of directing the strike,
as I say, it has basically usurped the powers of government in Homestead.
They're basically running Homestead. They're censoring the press.
They're throwing people in jail just because they said that
we don't like the way the strike is being run.
Charles Baird said the only thing that was missing was the guillotine.
He said it was like the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror, in effect, compared to Robespierre.
All right, well eventually the governor activated the National Guard
and managed to begin to gain control over the area and the plant from the advisory committee
and with the passage of time, non-union workers were able to be hired, enough of them
enough of them so that you could actually get things up and running again.
Now, in fact, even workers who have been on the strike were welcomed back to the plant,
except those who were responsible for the most egregious, you know, examples of animal exuberance,
you know, as we mentioned earlier today, they were exempted, but many of the strikers were
welcomed back and some non-union workers were admitted to employment as well.
Well, by the time you get to the fall of October, this advisory committee is still trying to carry on pressure against the Homestead plant.
And it's pretty obvious by October that they've lost. I mean, the plant is up and running. Everything seems to be fine.
So in October, given that even some of the people associated with the advisory committee group were going back to work for Homestead,
We note that a bomb went off in a boarding house that housed many non-union workers.
Another non-union worker had his own house burned down.
Other non-union workers, when they were caught alone in town, were beaten.
But that was it. Basically, the whole thing sputtered to a conclusion.
Now, in the midst of all this, by the way, the gentleman who had been in charge of the plant was Henry Clay Frick.
There's something funny about that name, and I can't put my finger on what it is exactly.
But while this was happening, he was actually shot twice by one of these anarchists.
But he stayed at work. In fact, he wrote a letter to his mother that day.
And in the letter, he had this solitary reference to what had happened to him.
He wrote, was shot twice today, though not seriously.
It's funny, he and Carnegie, after this, actually didn't really get along, but if I were Carnegie, I'd say,
this is exactly the guy I want working for me. The guy gets shot and he won't even...
Don't let my mother tell the story about the winter morning when I slipped on the ice after she said,
be careful, it's slippery out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bang! And I fractured my elbow. I didn't realize that at the time.
And I brushed myself off and went up to the bus stop and went to school.
The Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court eventually made a statement on this matter because the strike leaders were tried for treason against the state.
They were not in fact found guilty of that.
But in the course of that case, the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court made a statement on this matter because the strike leaders were tried for treason against the state.
The Relation of Employer and Employee is one of contract merely, neither party has a right to coerce the other into the making of a contract to which the mind does not assent.
The employer cannot compel his employee to work a day longer than he sees fit, nor his contract calls for, nor for a wage that is unsatisfactory to him.
It follows that the employee cannot compel his employer to give him work or to enter into a contract of hire much less can he dictate the terms of employment.
When the negotiations between the parties came to an end, the contract relations between them ceased.
The men had no further demand upon the company and they had no more interest or claim upon its property.
Nor does it make any difference that a large number were discharged at one time.
Their aggregate rights rise no higher than their rights as individuals.
The mutual right of the parties to contracts in regard to wages is as fixed and clear as any other right which we enjoy under the Constitution and laws of this state.
It is a right which belongs to every citizen, laborer or capitalist, and is the plain duty of the state to protect them in the enjoyment of it.
Labor historians, by the way, hate this judge. I'm not making that up. They say, this guy doesn't understand the situation at all.
The Steel Workers' Organization Committee, Local Unions in memory of the iron and steel workers who were killed in Homestead, Pennsylvania on July 6, 1892, while striking against the steel workers' organization.
Defends the Carnegie Steel Company in defense of their American rights
Doesn't seem like really the description that I think I would use to describe what happened as a defense of their American rights
And Baird's assessment is to say that it seems to me that what they were actually doing was violating the American rights of other people who just simply wanted to work at the Homestead plant
All right, that's at least a little bit of an overview of a couple of the better-known labor incidents,
and I think it goes to show how much work there is to be done on this,
because that's not the version of the story that typically comes out,
and yet these are all sources that are easily consulted, that you can easily get,
and so we need toward a reconstruction of American labor history,
and I now have two little kids and I have a million things to do,
so somebody here has to undertake this project.
Project. Okay, so we'll stop here. We'll finish with talking about labor, then take questions. Yes, sir, and then yes, sir.
If I understand, if I could just summarize it this way, you sort of see these labor problems as the result of, to coin a phrase, outside education, that in the absence of outsiders coming in and creating turmoil, that we wouldn't have these incidents?
Oh, well, I wouldn't say that as a matter of apodictic certainty.
The question is, am I saying that in the absence of outside agitation,
would we basically be free of these types of labor disputes?
Is it only because outsiders are coming in and organizing people?
But just as an empirical fact, it's so often the case that, at least in many cases,
the agitation for labor organization comes from an outside organization.
I was thinking what you said about the event and thinking about what happened to Harrison in 1876,
And how much of that influence of what happened in Paris was going back to the anarchists that were getting involved for agitation purposes?
Because I remember back in my college days, when agitators would say Pentecostal is now Berkeley, and we'd have, you know, people, Parkinson and out there.
And they would get the crowd all stimulated, and they leave, and they go on facing the National Guard.
And I was wondering how much of that outside agitation in 1892 was affected by what happened to Paris in 1876.
Well, I don't know if there's a direct connection, but I mean, I would at least point out that the Knights of Labor,
which had been around since the late 1860s was an organization that had enough internal problems as it was
because after a while they were admitting farmers into it too and it began to lose focus
but the Knights of Labor really suffered as a result of the Haymarket Incident in 1886
because one of the people who was accused of in some way conspiring to set off that bomb
happened to be a member of the Knights of Labor
Now, that doesn't mean that the Knights of Labor endorsed this.
I mean, they can't control every single person who's a member.
But people began to associate in their minds, oh, Knights of Labor, yeah, hay market.
And it's devastating for them.
And it's not coincidental that it was in that year that they began to disappear
and the American Federation of Labor began to increase.
So it means that the best way I can answer your question is to say that there was a very
careful attempt on the part of a guy like Samuel Gompers who was the head of the American
Federation of Labor to try to make sure that people who were violent or radical just by
philosophy as these types of anarchists were were not associated with his organization
because he didn't want to scare the heck out of the country. He didn't want people
to think of labor unions as the source of just kind of a systematic violence throughout
society that anarchists were associated with. But I think that's about the best I can do
Do you say more about Samuel Gompers and his role, if he's still a hero among high school students?
Thomas Schumpers was involved in the Anti-Imperialist League at the time of the Spanish-American War,
but then mainly the suppression of Philippine independence.
So he was somebody who, he wasn't the sort of labor leader who rallies his troops to go be ra-ra-ra
and we've got to support every war because they're all ipso facto just.
You know, he took a gamble by saying, well, you know what, I think this is immoral
and I'm going to stand up against it even if there are a bunch of flag waivers in my organization.
I'm nevertheless going to come out against it. That's a good thing.
So as I say, I don't want to take his name in vain too terribly much
because that was a heroic thing and we needed many thousands more people like him doing that.
By the way, my favorite incident on that, by the way, is Andrew Carnegie
as if to counter the claim that capitalism is imperialistic, you know,
like somehow of its nature is imperialistic.
Some of you know that Carnegie was not only involved in the American Anti-Imperialist League
League, but that he offered to buy the Philippines for $20 million so he could then give them
their independence.
It's a beautiful thing, and I remember saying that to somebody and saying, well, it's very
disturbing that one person could buy the Philippines, and I thought, well, I don't find it nearly
as disturbing as killing 200,000 of them to keep them a U.S. colony, but that's just the
way I am.
All right, yes?
Do you mind sharing the, you mentioned a quote earlier this morning about the idea that voluntary unionism can't enact an exact benefit for the workers, and it's likely the state will manage to get these benefits. Is that your position?
The Theory of Money and Credit
In the 1920s, or a large number of them, were clamoring for one kind or another of government assistance.
Well, certainly there are exceptions to that, but I think there are certain pressures in the very nature of the labor union
that make it want to use the coercive powers of the state, because that way they can more effectively keep out competing labor.
But you can nevertheless have a voluntary union that confines itself to things like helping out fellow workers
and just negotiating with the employer, I mean it still performs a useful function
and sometimes a strike, and I think Rothbard has made this point, a strike offering a wage that is well below the market wage
and he may just legitimately not know this and the workers then go on strike and basically nobody comes and accepts this offer
it's a way of alerting the employer peacefully that these terms are not acceptable
I just kind of have a comment. In the last few years, there's two periods of unionism.
There's one before World War II, where most unions are politically charged.
Where now, if people want them, they work first time for the government.
At least from that aspect, I can see that there's a lot of work to be done.
There's a lot of work to be done.
At least from that aspect, I can see, like, unionism, it's like, like back then, you know, like, people like Cindy Hillman and Elizabeth Warren and so on, and they had a kind of a goal, like, with those of the communist concept that was kind of involved in labor, but now it's kind of, it's been marginalized to such an extent that it's really not there anymore.
in terms of American workers being, the private sector being unionized.
So there's also that fact.
And then there's the fact that I think it was in the late 80s
that there's a decision that people do not have to pay, or could even be in the 90s,
that if you're paying labor union dues, you have a right on the basis of conscience
not to have them be earmarked for political purposes that you don't support.
Isn't that right? Wasn't there some kind of thing to that effect?
Oh, the teachers unions have that? I'm actually in a teachers union, by the way.
I get the American Federation of Teachers thing, because we're in a union at my college.
And part of me wants to call up and say, hey, you know, I don't want to read this magazine.
There's no point in you sending it to me.
But then I remember something I learned at the Morton Blackwell Leadership Institute.
And that is that if the bad guys want to give you a free copy of something, take it.
Because then it's one less copy they have to give to somebody else.
At the beginning of the election, you talked about growth effects, and I was wondering what rigor you consider, like your own work, to maintain the utilization of growth effects without submitting to thousands of people.
without submitting to policies of social utility or interpersonal utility.
We spent a lot of time talking about objective consumables that we have that even the people of the highest wealth in the past didn't have.
But, I mean, granted I have a toaster oven and Henry VIII didn't, I might still rather be Henry VIII.
This is a comment that's made by a lot of types of people.
Just because we have amenities today that people didn't have in the past,
that doesn't necessarily really mean anything.
Because maybe I would still rather live at some other time in the past.
Maybe I value other things about society more strongly than I value having a washer and dryer.
And I'm sympathetic to that argument because washer and dryer or a toaster oven in and of themselves,
The Theory of Money and Credit
One point that Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk,
In Europe, there's a ton of them, it's a little more expensive today.
As science becomes more wealthy, more things are required to not be pulled.
So for instance, right now in the inner cities people are very, very poor.
They can't afford to own an automobile. They basically can't get it by themselves.
So as you said, people can get jobs with automobiles if they get available,
but now in a way they're a way to sort of make people pull harder.
because the whole system of organizations has improved to such a degree that people can be left out in new ways.
Now, I mean, at least my point is to say while that's true, it's just, I don't know if it's the U.S. government having more of an automobile or none of that follows.
It's not at any farthest point. It's just, I've been thinking, I've been thinking of some force. I mean, I did think of something to be aware of.
There are certain changes that come from development that can have adverse effects on everybody.
in the past, nevertheless, the fact of our improved standard of living means that everybody
needs a car or needs some of these bigger things and not everyone can afford them and
so they get left out, left behind, whatever.
I guess I would say that just as an interesting counter example, in the 1980s, you could barely
walk down a city block without seeing a help wanted sign and yet it seemed as if inner
Intercity unemployment, or black unemployment, for example, seem to be more or less stagnant.
And in fact, if you ask these people, is the reason that you don't have a job because
there's a lack of jobs out there?
And three-quarters of them would say, no, that's not the reason.
And in fact, when you ask them about each other, like, what qualities do you think your
neighbor has?
They all found their neighbor was lazy and wouldn't get up and look for work and whatever.
Not themselves, of course, but their neighbor.
I have a lot of statistics about this in my chapter on the 60s in the politically incorrect
guide.
So, in other words, I guess I'm saying that sometimes we get kind of grandiose explanations
for what's causing poverty in this or that sector of the economy, but yet when you actually
look very closely, they don't seem to hold water.
It seems to be a much more fundamental and simple matter of some kind of dysfunction that's taking place there or whatever.
But I wouldn't discount this theory altogether, but I have to think it over.
I don't want to give a glib answer to it because it seems...
I don't think it's a stupid statement, so I don't want to just dismiss it as silly.
This will be another one of those things that if only I were drinking this week, we could really elicit a good answer.
yeah that's right yeah yeah they'll still try and get me to do it I'm sure
anybody else yeah that's true yeah right yeah that's right look at he says the
gentleman says go to China you see 50,000 bicycles at a red light yeah you get a
bicycle now this this will be quote you mark my words that'll be quoted on the
Internet. Tom Woods' Solution to Poverty? Get a bicycle. Oh, right, no, I understand.
Yeah, no, I understand that. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's see if we can hammer out, you
know, but that'd be a good, like, we should write something on that, because I
know you're overloaded with spare time, as am I. Yes.
No, but I think the bicycle answer is a reasonable response, that it can be applied to anything, but then there are also dynamic responses to anything.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, see, that's what I want to say, that there are dynamic responses, right.
Brian Kaplan has a recent piece on why is it that all the statistics that are aimed at curing unemployment or homelessness,
they draw information out of single bedroom apartment rates and whatnot,
college freshmen around the country have to like bump down in these like slum hotels of dormitories
and he's like to cure homelessness he says make them get roommates.
Well that's that's that's an interesting point in fact I remember seeing thankfully when I lived in
in in New York City when I was in grad school I had a you know reasonably good apartment but
some of the housing they had for the grad students I thought you've got to be kidding me like I mean
I was wondering, is there any work that you could recommend for additional reading, dealing with the movement of the radical left,
Starting off with 1876 in Paris, coming over to the United States, a lot of American radicals from the time of World War I were going off to Russia to create the communist revolution.
I remember one attorney from Chicago ended up being the number two person for the Far Eastern Republic, which was set up as a buffer between there and China, between the Soviet Union.
I'm just trying to think of the history of American radicalism seems more German and maybe East European than anything and the fact that they didn't speak English seemed to be kind of a hindrance because it made radicalism seem to be something that they didn't know how to do.
I don't know specifically on that issue, but I know a couple of people who would know, if anyone would know, so we can talk about that.
Are we all tired now? Are we tired? I'm tired.
Now, Chad, am I going to get docked if we stop?
Somebody want to come up here and sing or whatever, have like a talent show or stupid human tricks?
By the way, we'll just close with this. I once had a student who said, because at the beginning of the semester I just want to know,
Give me one interesting thing about you.
His interesting thing was, because he had no cartilage in his nose,
he could just press it flat against his face.
You know, and then, you know, after I stopped vomiting,
I thought that was a pretty good trick.
All right. All right. Thanks. Thanks a lot.