Government intervention is generally considered a bad idea (I won’t say “not legitimate”) because the intervention is usually laws that stop people from making the deals they want to make, which usually is bad for all parties involved—if they didn’t think the deal was better than no deal, they wouldn’t want to make it.
But I suppose there might be other government interventions that would be OK (for example providing information about competing offers, or offering education, etc.).
The idea is that government is a tool for enforcing a group decision. If at any given time half of workers are holding out for higher wages and half are scabs, then the managers are always fed and can always starve out the striking workers. So the striking workers want to use violent threats to prevent other workers from breaking the strike, i.e. making a deal they want to make with the managers. And this enforcement can be formalized / sublated into government, both as specific negotiating outcomes (wage, working conditions) and as process (unions given some power by government-enforced law, I assume?). (In practice this might be very far from what actually ends up happening. And I’m not particularly in favor of gvt. But I can see the game-theoretic use, and I think this is the historical origin of unions and wage laws and worker’s rights… or maybe it’s not?)
If our libertarianism implies no monopoly on force, then unions can still prevent trades between willing parties. If it implies enforcing no use of force at all, then it seems like we’ve severely limited the ability of workers to bargain, relative to the “state of nature”. Maybe unions would regrow without being founded on threats of violence? But this seems surprising; it seems like it would require a high degree of game-theoretic fluency.
But it seems very little government intervention into any economic activity or relationship is really dominated by the wishes or needs of those directly involved. Most seems related to external impact—parties outside the direct exchange.
Government intervention is generally considered a bad idea (I won’t say “not legitimate”) because the intervention is usually laws that stop people from making the deals they want to make, which usually is bad for all parties involved—if they didn’t think the deal was better than no deal, they wouldn’t want to make it.
But I suppose there might be other government interventions that would be OK (for example providing information about competing offers, or offering education, etc.).
The idea is that government is a tool for enforcing a group decision. If at any given time half of workers are holding out for higher wages and half are scabs, then the managers are always fed and can always starve out the striking workers. So the striking workers want to use violent threats to prevent other workers from breaking the strike, i.e. making a deal they want to make with the managers. And this enforcement can be formalized / sublated into government, both as specific negotiating outcomes (wage, working conditions) and as process (unions given some power by government-enforced law, I assume?). (In practice this might be very far from what actually ends up happening. And I’m not particularly in favor of gvt. But I can see the game-theoretic use, and I think this is the historical origin of unions and wage laws and worker’s rights… or maybe it’s not?)
If our libertarianism implies no monopoly on force, then unions can still prevent trades between willing parties. If it implies enforcing no use of force at all, then it seems like we’ve severely limited the ability of workers to bargain, relative to the “state of nature”. Maybe unions would regrow without being founded on threats of violence? But this seems surprising; it seems like it would require a high degree of game-theoretic fluency.
But it seems very little government intervention into any economic activity or relationship is really dominated by the wishes or needs of those directly involved. Most seems related to external impact—parties outside the direct exchange.