Democrats Don't Understand Trade-Offs
How pro-union Joe Biden is (unintentionally) doing everything he can to harm the United Auto Workers union.
President Joe Biden has decided unreservedly to support the striking United Auto Workers union. He aspires to be the "most pro-union president in American history.”
Biden understands little about economics, however, and he blinds himself to obvious and unavoidable tradeoffs. Indeed, his policies contributed greatly to the auto-industry dynamics that caused the strikes. Moreover, should the manufacturers capitulate to the UAW’s demands, the union’s medium- and long-term power would likely decline.
This author discussed all this in the Washington Examiner:
Electric vehicles, which the Inflation Reduction Act heavily subsidizes, contain fewer parts than gas-powered vehicles. Their assemblage consequently requires as many as 40% fewer workers — not good news for union jobs. The threat environmentalist economic interventions pose to existing energy sector jobs should surprise nobody.
Their subsidies and regulatory barriers have distorted market incentives, prompting businesses to reallocate capital and other resources toward economically inefficient projects. The Wall Street Journal reports that Ford, in 2023’s first quarter, lost almost $60,000 on each EV sold, and the company has projected for its EV division a total annual loss of $4.5 billion.
…
[UAW boss Shawn] Fain has demanded for his members 40% wage increases, a 32-hour work week, better pensions and retirement benefits, recurring inflation-tied wage adjustments, and more. Sources told Bloomberg that Fain’s demands would boost the Big Three’s labor costs by $80 billion apiece. Total hourly compensation (wages plus benefits) would rise from the current $64 past $150. By seeking unsustainably generous wages, work schedules, and benefits, Fain poses a serious threat to his own union’s future. Securing the UAW’s desired compensation bumps would incentivize all manufacturers to cut costs by decamping to right-to-work states or to foreign countries such as Mexico. Far from the UAW’s $150-per-hour pipe dream, analysts peg the hourly average wages at $55 and $45 at nonunion plants and nonunion Tesla plants, respectively.
Ballooning manufacturers’ labor cost will only hasten the migration of UAW jobs to right-to-work states and foreign nations as well as the adoption of automation.
Some Wisdom
This author returned this week to The Chronicles of Prydain, a children’s fantasy series by Lloyd Alexander. The books follow the exploits and maturation of young Taran, an assistant pig-keeper, to whom — at the story’s beginning, at least — nothing interesting has ever happened.
In the first volume, The Book of Three, Alexander writes the following in his author’s note:
The chronicle of Prydain is a fantasy. Such things never happen in real life. Or do they? Most of us are called on to perform tasks far beyond what we can do. Our capabilities seldom match our aspirations, and we are often woefully unprepared. To this extent, we are all Assistant Pig-Keepers at heart.
This question — How does the ordinary person respond to extraordinary circumstances? — appears in many works. Shakespeare’s Hamlet asks it. Likely, most people ask it in some fashion regarding their own lives.
Ancient literature centered itself on the abnormal, superhuman exploits of heroes and the like. That impulse has faded in recent centuries. Alexis de Tocqueville posited this theory in Democracy in America:
In democratic communities, where men are all insignificant and very much alike, each man instantly sees all his fellows when he surveys himself. The poets of democratic ages, therefore, can never take any man in particular as the subject of a piece; for an object of slender importance, which is distinctly seen on all sides, will never lend itself to an ideal conception.
Thus the principle of equality, in proportion as it has established itself in the world, has dried up most of the old springs of poetry. Let us now attempt to see what new ones it may disclose.
When skepticism had depopulated heaven, and the progress of equality had reduced each individual to smaller and better-known proportions, the poets, not yet aware of what they could substitute for the great themes that were departing together with the aristocracy, turned their eyes to inanimate nature. As they lost sight of gods and heroes, they set themselves to describe streams and mountains. Thence originated, in the last century, that kind of poetry which has been called, by way of distinction, descriptive. Some have thought that this embellished delineation of all the physical and inanimate objects which cover the earth was the kind of poetry peculiar to democratic ages; but I believe this to be an error, and that it belongs only to a period of transition.
I am persuaded that in the end democracy diverts the imagination from all that is external to man and fixes it on man alone. Democratic nations may amuse themselves for a while with considering the productions of nature, but they are excited in reality only by a survey of themselves. Here, and here alone, the true sources of poetry among such nations are to be found; and it may be believed that the poets who neglect to draw their inspirations hence will lose all sway over the minds which they would enchant, and will be left in the end with none but unimpassioned spectators of their transports.
Ralph Waldo Emerson welcomed this change:
Instead of the sublime and beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts.
…
I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin, the milk in the pan, the ballad in the street, the news of the boat, the glance of the eye, the form and the gait of the body — show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
…
This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature.
Some Beauty
Given the recent attacks on Israel, it seems appropriate to appreciate that exceptional country’s exceptional beauty. One of this author’s favorite cities there is Tzfat.
There is great beauty in old things.
And, of course:
עם ישראל חי
Some Humor
Returning to Emerson. He relates:
Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying, “that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water.”
Quite so. Hopefully everybody in American politics brought their swimsuits.
Sundry Links, &c.
I’ll be trick-or-treating in Florida this year.
Reinstating Title II net neutrality would be painfully bad policy.