I have, but you are only interested in establishing yourself as the smartest person in the thread instead of addressing my argument.
You're already resorting to ad hominem attacks? Instead of worrying about my motives, just make your point, already. If you're on firm ground with your beliefs, why all the obfuscation?
Because the more money and benefits the greedy PUBLIC sector unions ask for, the more my taxes go up.
So, you think desire to pay a smaller bill justifies command pricing and breaking the labor market. Under that rationale, we would be operating under a Soviet system. You do understand that command pricing is the very thing that drove the economy of the USSR into the ground, the thing that the Cold War was waged over, and one of two key points that defines communism (the other being state ownership of the means of production)? You know, the thing that you righties like to scream about whenever Obama does, well, anything? You do get that that's what you're advocating for, don't you? I get a real kick out of righties who get so tangled in talking points that they advocate communism.
Anyway, were we to apply your rationale, the US would be operating on a command economy pricing system instead of a market pricing system. Since I'm guessing you don't understand why that's a bad thing (you advocate it, after all), I'll lay it out, again in broad strokes. Everyone wants to pay less for everything. That's essentially a restatement of enlightened self-interest. A market system takes advantage of it by pitting it against itself, suppliers and demanders, engaged in negotiation, a process which elicits information from both parties, helps to define the net gain from an agreement, and decides on how that gain is to be split. By contrast, a command pricing system simply sets prices where it thinks they should be, ignoring that enlightened self interest and letting the chips fall as they will, and often winds up with surpluses and shortages as a result, as the price set is only rarely at market equilibrium, the price where quantity supplied meets quantity demanded for a given product. In short, the market way is vastly more efficient - this is the underpinning of the mixed market economy we are in. That's also why wanting to pay less for something doesn't justify resort to command pricing - market failure, and often severe inefficiency results. It's a really crappy way to manage an economy - just ask the USSR.
To help make the above concepts clearer, I'll provide an example. The labor market is fairly complex, with a number of popular economic models to describe it, and I'm trying to keep this simple, so I'll go with a product instead. Let's use the B2 Stealth Bomber. We want to pay less for these things - they're like 2 bill a pop. So we use your rationale and go with command pricing instead. We decide we're only going to pay 1.5 billion. Of course, the real value of that bomber is 2 billion, give or take, so what we're essentially doing is pocketing 500 million of extra profit from the transaction for the taxpayer, and extracting it from the company making the bomber.
Of course, no company is going to want to make the 1.5 bil bomber, and in this case, it simply wouldn't get built, unless the government nationalized the company's means of production (this is a major reason why command pricing and nationalization go hand-in-hand). In the case of labor, however, the supply is fairly inelastic unless the job in question requires little training. That is to say, about the same amount of labor is going to be supplied no matter the price set. This allows employers to seek to carve out extra profit without the need to nationalize - the worker is going to wind up working at less than market value, resulting in market failure, unless they have some organized resistance. This is one major reason why we have labor unions to begin with.
It's also worth pointing out that, the more elastic a unionized supply of labor is (the less training it requires to do the job), the more the benefits of the union extend beyond the union, to other workers in the broader labor market, because they have more valuable alternatives - their wages increase as the result of unionized labor. The trend is alarmingly clear in this graph:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/20/report-incomes/
In fact, that graph is probably showing an even stronger correlation than actually exists, since a whole host of republican policies over the last three decades have been exerting a downward pressure on middle class income, aside from unionbusting. Mostly, this has involved quietly doing nothing: for example, refusing to peg the minimum wage to inflation, but inflation-indexing the alternative minimum tax, which results in an inflationary pay cut for the majority of workers every year, staggered with the middle class gradually paying more in taxes as they enter higher brackets due to the inflation. Or refusing to close tax loopholes that allow CEOs and major corporations to pay less than even the lowest tax bracket (janitors and secretaries being the favorite comparisons there). There are more active measures as well, like starving the IRS of funding - something they're trying to do again this year (and also something that is COMPLETELY at odds with their supposed newfound fiscal responsibility).
PL
