> Nonsense. We live in a society which is maintained with public money, and very few businesses would be profitable without that.

That we vote to pay for through our elected representatives; the same people who directly determine budgets, salaries and have political skin in the game to get re-elected at the time of contract negotiation and have firing power.

Public projects are not the same as public salaries. A highway is not drawing a salary from the treasury, but the people who work on it are.

> Heck, money itself is a public institution.

Not necessarily so, and also irrelevant.

> It's absolutely on topic when you're suggesting that we should apply much stricter rules to employment relations than we apply to every other interaction between citizens and government.

The market price of your house going up because of restrictive zoning is not the same as drawing a salary directly from the treasury. Restrictive zoning has other issues, but zoning is only one factor of many which can inform the price of your house, it does not set the price of your house. You are conflating something which is unrelated to working directly for the government.

> Banning unions does nothing to address that - people are still "on both sides of the table" when negotiating as individuals, they're just a lot more reliant on their individual capabilities. Requiring everyone to do their own legal research and individual negotiations is grossly inequitable and could never be a full solution to that kind of issue - if there's some principled problem with citizens negotiating with their governments, that needs to apply to powerful individuals (including but not limited to higher-class government employees) too.

People decide all the time whether unions are actually beneficial for them in the private sector and many times vote against it either by choosing non-union employers where both are an option or by voting for or against joining a union when a unionization vote occurs.

Let’s take an example: Google is a large employer where there has been an effort to unionize the workforce (how is that going by the way? Hadn’t thought about it in a while till I was typing this). They are a private employer, and they earn their revenue from many sources: namely anyone that chooses to pay for ads on their properties, and then variously from other sources which can include government contracts. Government organizations may also choose to pay for ads on Google Search the same as if they purchased ads from elsewhere as they have been known to do from time to time. This does not make Google a public sector employer though: they are a publicly traded but private organization with a Board of Directors to represent their owners interests and an Executive team which is tasked with operating the company including whether to take on or pass on government contracts as they so choose. Taking a dollar, a thousand dollars or a billion dollars in revenue from the Feds does not make Google a corporate serf of the Feds and the owners, Board of Directors, Executive team, Employees and 1099s each have their own rights and interests. A Google employee working on a government project did not elect the Executives who approved the project and his salary, even if he may have elected the Senator that said it was a good idea for Google to handle it.

(That said this should come with the caveat that government projects have their own moral hazards all the time, they’re just usually not this one that we are discussing.)

> And again, what's so special about the employment relationship? Surely the same logic applies to residents' associations, or advocacy groups, or professional associations - there are all kinds of groups of citizens that regularly find themselves on the other side of negotiations with those same citizens' elected governments

Private advocacy groups have to compete with other moneyed interests. Public-sector unions do not. There is no one else that is going to pay government salaries except the government, and they get their money by taking it from people who earned it. Unionized employees of all stripes tend to vote as a bloc because taking collective action is their raison d’être. The government is not approving contracts between private sector companies and private sector unions. They are approving contracts between themselves and public sector unions, and have hiring and firing power over the negotiators at the table representing the public’s interest.

That’s a moral hazard. That is the distinction.