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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Jan. 4, 2006 / 4 Teves, 5766

Were subway strikers thugs?

By John Stossel


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | I just suffered through a transit strike. I'm ticked off about it. It didn't hurt me much, actually — I ride a bike most days — but New York's Transport Workers Union tortured a million commuters by going on strike. And going on strike for what? Their employer wanted to raise the retirement age for new workers — not even current union members, people who haven't been hired yet — to a ripe old 62, or make them pay more of their pension costs.


Big deal.


Some 30 people apply for each of these jobs, according to Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute. That says a lot about whether those workers are "exploited."


It makes me want to call them "thugs." My mayor called them that. Mike Bloomberg said union leaders were acting "thuggishly."


But are they thugs?


Suppose you want a raise. Your boss offers you less than you think you're worth, so you tell him you won't work unless he makes a better offer. He responds that if you stop working, he'll force you to pay him thousands of dollars — and maybe he'll send you to prison.


Who's the thug, you or your boss?


Your boss — in the transit workers' case, the government — is the thug.


Government is conceited. It thinks it's special. It makes laws to protect itself from the unions of its employees. The federal government and most states pass laws that forbid strikes. The transit workers were threatened with fines of two days' pay for each day on strike, their union with a fine of $1 million per day, and its president with jail time. This was wrong.


The beauty of capitalism is that deals must always be win-win, or they don't happen. You work for an employer if you think you're better off working for him than not doing so; he employs you if he thinks you're worth what you demand.


A strike is simply an organized refusal to work for less than the strikers think they're worth. The principle is the same whether one individual or a union walks off the job: It's the principle of self-ownership, the underlying principle of the whole capitalist system, the principle that we are all free individuals dealing voluntarily to mutual advantage. As John Locke taught in the "Second Treatise of Government," "every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his."


Of course, just as workers have a right to strike, employers — morally, at least — have a right to fire them. Under President Reagan, the federal government dismissed striking air-traffic controllers and let eager new employees take the jobs. That might have been a good response to New York's transit strike. Bus drivers must be easier to replace than air-traffic controllers. But replacing the strikers wasn't even discussed. And neither was an even more radical solution: firing both the workers and the public management, or in other words, privatization.


People think that mass transit must be a government function: Who would build the subways? But did you know that private companies built many of New York's subways and ran them until government forcibly took them over? The private sector would do it better.


If private enterprise ran a city's buses, there would be many different bus companies, with many different contracts with their workers.


If one bus company's workers walked out, trains and other bus lines would still be available. This would make a strike much less harmful to the public, but more dangerous to the company, which could find itself out of business. Some London subway-station workers just celebrated the new year with a 24-hour strike; London bus service, operated by private companies, was not interrupted. Too bad New York government, instead of privatizing the bus lines it runs, is taking over the lines operated by private companies.


The New York transit strike illustrated two of the dangers of an overgrown government. When you let government monopolize something, you invite stifling disruption when government fails, and you invite it to try to force people to work — and call them thugs for acting on their freedom.

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