Cryptocurrency: The Fiat Standard vs Worker Unions

[grarpamp]

In free markets unions achieve market results.
In corrupt controlled markets unions are uneconomic psyops
and pawns of the corrupt controllers (Biden pickets with UAW).
History proves that such artificial unfree unions propped up by the
"laws" and enforcers of government socialism, always fail.

Crypto leverages free capital, routing around controlled markets
to re-establish free markets and cultures of voluntary charity.


Striking Autoworkers Will Only Harm Their Own Livelihoods

https://mises.org/wire/striking-autoworkers-will-only-harm-their-own-livelihoods

Authored by Connor O'Keefe via The Mises Institute,

https://mises.org/topics/anarchy
https://www.vox.com/2023/9/15/23875044/uaw-strike-news-contract-demands-wentzville-toledo-wayne
https://www.autonews.com/suppliers/2023-uaw-strike-would-savage-struggling-suppliers
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/gold-convertibility-ends
https://mises.org/library/feds-2-inflation-target
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=18ZEm
https://mises.org/library/deflation-free-or-compulsory
https://store.mises.org/Fiat-Standard-The-Debt-Slavery-Alternative-to-Human-Civilization-P11220.aspx
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/11/10/financialization-and-income-inequality/
https://mises.org/wire/financialization-why-financial-sector-now-rules-global-economy
https://mises.org/library/roots-housing-shortage
https://mises.org/wire/how-government-regulations-made-healthcare-so-expensive
https://mises.org/wire/current-farm-bill-fraud-government-usual
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/05/16/the_green_movement_is_a_jobs_killer_are_unions_finally_figuring_this_out_149230.html
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/23/electric-cars-autoworkers-contract-strike
https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Classics/dp/0140445684/
https://cdn.mises.org/Capital%20and%20Interest_0.pdf
https://uaw.org/about/
https://cdn.mises.org/Restrictionist%20Pricing%20of%20Labor_Rothbard.pdf
https://www.vox.com/2023/9/15/23875044/uaw-strike-news-contract-demands-wentzville-toledo-wayne
https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Bastiat%20Collection_4.pdf

On Friday, September 15, 12,700 members of the United Auto Workers
union (UAW) walked off the job at plants owned by the “Big Three”
automakers - Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (which owns
Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram). The walkout marked the beginning of a series
of long-expected targeted strikes aiming to give the UAW leverage as
it renegotiates contracts with the three companies. And Friday
September 22, the situation escalated.

The strike is grounded in frustrations over worker compensation.

Union members and their supporters point to high profits and CEO pay
at the Big Three and compare them to stagnant wages and rising costs
of living among autoworkers. They feel like they’re being ripped off.

And they’re right. Like the rest of the working class, autoworkers are
being ripped off. Decades of interventionism have built an economic
system that harms workers while helping the corporate and political
classes. The first reason for this is monetary policy. Ever since
President Richard Nixon abolished the gold standard in the early
1970s, a handful of bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve have been
charged with determining the value of our currency. And those
bureaucrats have decided that the dollar should lose value every year.
They aim for a decline of 2 percent annually, but the rate has been
higher in recent years.

Dollar devaluation is a political choice. And it hurts workers. In an
unhampered market, money becomes more valuable as societies grow
wealthier. Goods become better and more affordable. And money saved
grows in value.

Under our current inflationist fiat regime, the opposite happens.
Savings shrink in value by design. The result is spelled out by
Saifedean Ammous in his book The Fiat Standard:

    The culture of conspicuous mass consumption that pervades our
planet today cannot be understood except through the distorted
incentives fiat creates around consumption. With the money constantly
losing its value, deferring consumption and saving will likely have a
negative expected value. Finding the right investments is difficult,
requires active management and supervision, and entails risk. The path
of least resistance, the path permeating the entire culture of fiat
society, is to consume all your income, living paycheck to paycheck.

We can see, then, how monetary policy leads to mass consumption, low
savings, and hyperfinancialization—all at the same time. In fact, one
of the most notable examples of the financialization of the economy
since the 1970s has been the growth of the Big Three automakers’
financial arms—GM Financial, Ford Credit, and Stellantis Financial
Services.

In fact, as Ryan McMaken highlights: “By the early 2000s, a majority
of GM’s profits were coming from its financial operations and not from
automobile production.”

In other words, the automakers have profited from the very same
government policies that devalue their workers’ paychecks and savings.

But monetary policy is only one part of the story. Governments at all
levels restrict the supply of housing by limiting building. That makes
housing less affordable. The federal government also bids up demand
for healthcare services while restricting the supply of doctors and
hospitals, and it shields drug manufacturers from competition. That
makes healthcare much more expensive. Meanwhile, Washington’s
agricultural policy aims to prop up crop prices, which impacts the
price of many foods. All this artificially drives up the cost of
living.

That’s bad enough for autoworkers, but the Biden administration is
also trying to force a transition to electric vehicles (EVs). For
autoworkers building engines, transmissions, and exhaust systems,
that’s a threat to their jobs. And because the ramp-up of EV
production is driven by politics rather than consumer demand, the
transition is set to hurt all workers who rely on cars.

Considering all that, it is obvious why autoworkers are frustrated
with their financial situation. But unfortunately, their justified
anger has been hijacked by another source of their problems, the UAW.
Support for labor unions rests on an economic myth from the
mid-eighteenth century.

In short, it’s the idea that companies make profits by not paying
workers the full value of their labor. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk
dismantled this socialist exploitation theory 139 years ago when he
introduced time into the analysis. Companies pay workers in the
present for labor services that may lead to saleable goods in the
future. Because of the universal trait of time preference, the
certainty of money now is often more appealing than the possibility of
more money later, which is why so many people choose to sell their
labor services on the job market.

Böhm-Bawerk’s insights are easy to see in auto manufacturing, where
workers are paid up front to help build cars that will be sold later.
Still, the flawed idea that profits signify wage theft caught on, and
in 1935, autoworkers founded the UAW. The present strikes speak to the
persistence of this myth.

Labor unions often appeal to worker solidarity, but in truth, they
epitomize the exact opposite. Because as Murray Rothbard has shown,
they can only raise wages for some workers by lowering the wages or
eliminating the jobs of other workers. At the Big Three automakers,
this can be seen in the heavy use of temporary and part-time workers,
who are placed on a lower pay tier—the elimination of which is
ironically a core demand of the UAW strike. But this situation is just
what’s visible. All those who are blocked entirely from the jobs that
would be available to them if not for the union remain unseen.

America’s autoworkers are right to be angry about their economic
situation. But the restrictionist labor demands of the UAW are a
distraction that will, at most, help some autoworkers at the expense
of others. The real solution lies in ending union practices that
unnecessarily pit workers against each other, ending the policies that
force companies to produce things consumers don’t even want, ending
the multitude of government programs and political privileges that
artificially raise the cost of living, and ending the monetary system
that destroys the value of workers’ paychecks and savings while
propping up the financial class. Abolish all that, and the benefits
will extend far beyond the auto industry.