Thett3 Tournament: Labor Unions are a net benefit to humanity

As discussed previously, this round is only 4500 characters long. Institutions for growth Throughout this debate, I have demonstrated how labor unions hamper economic growth, using theoretical and empirical evidence. PRO has not criticized that this is true, only critiquing growth itself. There is no doubting that wealth is the greater good. It has increased life expectancy, general well being, created modern medicine and other technologies. This debate would not have occurred without the technologies that exist based on wealth generation. Yet, despite the decline in labor unions society is better off than where it was previously. Due to exponential growth factors, small changes in growth create large differences in standard of livings in the long run. A difference between 2% growth and 3% growth is an economy tripling its size in a hundred years. This wealth benefits the poor and welfare programs cannot even expand without increasing the wealth. I have demonstrated in previously rounds that wealth is spread to everyone, not just the rich. The wealth generating effects go to the poor and middle class first, and whatever is left over goes to the rich, in the short run. In the long run companies copy each other ideas and companies can only become wealthy from becoming more innovative then their competition. Everyone wins. I have also demonstrated that unions have a corrupting effect on government officials as well. I have used the bailouts of the auto-industry which were designed to pamper to the unions at the expense of the rule of law on how normal bankruptcy procedures occur and at the taxpayers’ expense. Unions spend millions campaigning for their candidates so that the government can provide rent-seeking benefits to them. The evidence that labor unions can reduce income inequality is clumsy at best, since unions only seek to increase the wealth of their own members, and non-unionized workers have to work at lower-wage jobs. Non-unionized teachers that have to work $10,000 less then unionized workers demonstrate this. PRO wants to make the distinction between “upper-management” and “laborers” since he believes upper-management makes more while laborers make less. He says the distinction between the two are obvious, but has not responded to examples where I question the distinction. Are secretaries, that often make less, considered part of upper-management or not? Nor just because PRO believes that there should be a distinction between these two types of unions, does not mean that it will occur in the real world. Instead, collective bargaining occurs where it’s easier for it to happen. As stated before, there’s union for people that make high wages. There were baseball strikers [1] and a union for Hollywood actors, two groups that are clearly well off. However, the idea that income equality is desirable is also questionable. If both people’s disposable income are increasing, so what if one person’s income is increasing by more. It is not better that the poor remain poorer so long as the rich don’t get richer. Public labor Unions are especially bad PRO has been inadequately been able to refute the problem of corrupt unions influence on public officials. It is not just the politicians in charge that are corrupt, but the people carrying out the laws and regulations. Unions stop corrupt government workers from deserved firing. It’s obvious from the rubber room example that teacher’s jobs are overly cushioned. In order to improve government, efficiency is the key, which unions harm as I have demonstrated and PRO does not refute. The workers having to worry about the government is absurd. Rather, the public has to worry about the government as history has demonstrated, in which the government works to benefit special interest groups. The unions are one of them. Throwing money at the solution and expecting the rich to pay more will not work, since it has not historically worked previously and the problems of government are spending problems, not a revenue problem. The top 1% of earners already pays 40% of taxes [2]. Of course, politicians would love to be able to stop the rich from taking advantage of loopholes and sending money overseas. But it’s difficult to complete these actions. Trying to prevent money from going oversea would require police-state surveillance to do so and require expensive resources. Top-down economics This whole argument has been a strawman. Instead of attacking my main institution, PRO has attacked top-down economics. I have shown how these institutions that PRO attacks are different from the institutions I advocate. Giving corporations money will not cause them to hire more, since workers are paid based on their productivity. However, if wages are lowered, corporations would not hire them because they are below their productivity. Thus artificially increasing wages does lead to higher unemployment. PRO’s example of increasing the minimum wage does not work because: a) One cannot increase prices on products with more elastic demand (like websites) b) The problems of unemployment and layoffs would occur in the longer run c) Cost-push inflation is harmful to all. [1] . http://tinyurl.com... [2] . http://tinyurl.com...