Selling your support to the enemy state

The Wall Street Journal reports that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has so far refrained from providing official support for either of the two major parties and presidential candidates in the upcoming elections (“Some teamsters riot after boss praises Trump”, August 24). A Teamsters spokeswoman stated:

Our support must be earned.

The meaning of this phrase is clear: the organization will officially support the candidate or party that promises to give it the most in terms of compelling legal privileges or cash for its members. The Brotherhood sells its support for privileges, and the government sells its privileges for support. It’s a political exchange between greedy bullies.

What state theory can justify that? The cynical view is to think, “It’s our turn to get privileges!” The angelic view of the state exists instead of thinking, “Oh my God, that’s bad, they should (like me) selflessly pursue the common good.” A basket of other justifications includes many arguments claiming that the rules under which we live or have decided to live allow for limited political exchange; some (James Buchanan, for example) are more defensible than others (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example).

Another, anti-state approach has been proposed by economist and political philosopher Anthony de Jasay. The Teamsters’ negotiations are seen as a manifestation of the “adversary state” or discriminatory state, which takes sides in favor of some citizens and against others. Among those living under the discriminatory state, the winners are those who negotiate most efficiently to sell their support to the state.

In a sense, the Teamsters’ officialdom believes in a dictatorship of the proletariat with a human face, that is, in which the proletariat votes. But this is only a first approximation. In fact, many of its members (policemen and pilots, for example) are not proletarians at all; the others are not paupers. As the logo shows, the union was more proletarian (assuming that term has any meaning in a free market) when its original members in 1903 were horse-drawn cart drivers. Their hierography presents them as early defenders of ‘social justice’. According to historian David Witwer, the Teamsters union admitted and recruited blacks as full members, but was not untainted by the racism of the unions and of the white workers who often resented the competition of the blacks (see his “Race Relations in the Early Teamsters Union,” Employment history 43-4 [2002]).

Perhaps I should emphasize that in a standard (classical) liberal or libertarian perspective there is no reason to be against collective bargaining, provided that each member of the “collective” (the members of the union) is a voluntary member and that the the other side, against whom it is negotiating, is not forced by the law to ‘negotiate’. As a terminological matter, and parallel to substantive ‘collectivism’, I propose that ‘collective’ should refer to groups that impose their will on recalcitrant members; in this sense, free trade unions could be involved group negotiation, not collective negotiate. Trade unions would be as useful as any voluntary association, and in certain circumstances perhaps even more useful, provided it remains voluntary and has no coercive privileges. In general, the way to know whether an institution is useful in the economic sense of “efficient” is that it survives without any legal privilege.