Re: An Open Letter To Open-Minded Progressives

*Anarcissie* wrote:
> On Apr 20, 5:14 am, raven1 <quoththera...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>> What do you think John Galt or Howard Roark's opinion towards labor
>>  unions would have been?
> 
> I believe that somewhere in the two-thirds of _Atlas_ _Shrugged_ I
> managed to read long ago she has one or more _bad_ people who
> represent union leaders.  (It's been about 40 years so my memory is a
> little hazy.)  However, in the classical-liberal principles which Ayn
> Rand seems to espouse much of the time, there is absolutely nothing
> wrong with unions -- like cor****ations, they are simply an expression
> of the right to associate for economic advantage.  I don't think Rand
> is tremendously logical or consistent, however, and she is certainly 
> not much of an observer of human behavior.   It would not surprise me
> if my memory turned out to be correct, as it sometimes does.

My copy of _Atlas Shrugged_ falls open to page 520, where one can find 
the following passage:

"The first man to quit Rearden Steel was Tom Colby, rolling mill 
foreman, head of the Rearden Steel Workers Union. For ten years, he had 
heard himself denounced throughout the country, because his was a 
'company union' and because he had never engaged in a violent conflict 
with the management. This was true: no conflict had ever been necessary; 
Rearden paid a higher wage scale than any union scale in the country, 
for which he demanded -- and got -- the best labor force to be found 
anywhere."

There's a number of notable things here.

The Rearden Steel Workers Union appears to be a "company union" -- a 
phony labor union set up and run by the company in order to rob the 
workers of the benefits of having a real labor union. (Or should one 
take the quotation marks as scare quotes indiciating that this term is 
inaccurate?) But Rearden Steel nonetheless doesn't bleed its employees 
dry in the way Objectivism's egoist ethics demands. The workers seem to 
be Evil Altruists, too, as they apparently don't mind paying this phony 
union to do nothing at all for them.

Then there's the claim that some unspecified individuals "throughout the 
country" have been denouncing Colby because "he had never engaged in a 
violent conflict with the management". Such a violent conflict would 
prove entertaining, since Colby is himself part of the management. While 
Rand leaves unstated just who would make this criticism, it seems to be 
either a pure straw man or a bit of fantasy unrelated to the real world.

-- 
Dan Clore

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