PrintThe utter, irrational stupidity of Matthew Yglesias
I just happened to read this businessman bashing post from liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias and I'm still having trouble picking my lower jaw off the floor:
I’m probably not breaking any news if I tell you that American business really hates unions and, thus, really hates the Employee Free Choice Act. Thus, even though John Boehner is trying to destroy the American economy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is squarely focusing its fire on pro-EFCA Democrats. Your typical business executive would rather let the world burn, or see his children fed to a pack of wild boars, then see a union form at his firm. And it makes a certain amount of sense—businessmen appreciate the value of class solidarity. If you run your company into the ground, you get a nice severance package and another job at another company. But if you let your company be unionized, you’d be dead to your brethren. An attack on one is an attack on all, and they all stand together on this point.
First of all, Mr. Yglesias's deterministic view of the relationship between labor and management is giggle worthy. Does anyone really write stuff like this anymore? "The value of class solidarity?" "They" all stand together? "An attack on one is an attack on all...?" How quaint.
The only place you hear stuff like "Your typical business executive would rather let the world burn, or see his children fed to a pack of wild boars, then see a union form at his firm..." is Cuba. Maybe. Seeing the world through the prism of "class struggles" is so profoundly ignorant that even Communism has toned down that kind of rhetoric. Economic determinism is dead, buried, and long since rotted away as a result of its spectacular success in explaining and predicting economic activity in such vibrant societies as the Soviet Union, East Germany, and the rest of the Iron Curtain countries.
The fact that those governments and even some of those countries don't exist anymore should tell you all you need to know about Yglesias's trenchant analysis of the American businessman.
