The Ron Paul Legacy

The libertarian Texas congressman has retired. Will his radical ideas stick around on Capitol Hill?

Ron Paul is officially no longer a congressman. Gone from the Washington scene is his tendency to cast lone votes, his unique willingness to point out that government is inherently based on violence. Paul will continue to be a public spokesman for liberty—about the only part of his job as congressman he liked anyway.

He leaves behind a contested legacy. As Paul’s detractors will tediously point out, being one of 435 in Congress with views vastly different from your colleagues’ means you will neither pass many laws, nor prevent many laws from being passed, nor shape the ethos of the House. Paul did, though, succeed in shifting “Audit the Fed” from an issue no one knew or cared about to a bill that has passed the House twice.

Through his Republican presidential runs in 2008 and 2012, he conjured a large and dedicated army of libertarian activists and politicos where one hadn’t existed before, though we don’t know how many of the 2.1 million people who voted for him in GOP primaries in 2012 are as hardcore libertarian as Paul. Two thriving organizations, Campaign for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty, arose from those campaigns and survive his congressional career.

But can lasting change within our sclerotic political system arise from a movement as insurrectionist and outside the mainstream as Paul’s? And will he have any heirs to keep what he started rolling? A vote total of 2.1 million is a surprisingly impressive number, to be sure, especially for such a harsh critic of empire, drug wars, and fiat money. But it still represents a decidedly losing portion of what was, nationally in 2012, a losing party.

What the Paul revolutionaries are trying to do, they insist, has been done before. They are trying to use a rowdy, young-skewing throng to force a major party to embrace ideas that seem fanatical to existing party hierarchies. Remember the Barry Goldwater kids in 1960, uniting fervently behind a strongly anti-government author of a best-selling book of popular political philosophy, freaking out the party powers with their youth and outsider enthusiasm? It’s impossible to read a history of the Goldwater movement without seeing how similar the Goldwater and Paul stories are—the anti-state energy, the mistrust and warring with the hidebound establishment, even the streaks of weird paranoia among some of the activists.

Goldwater and Paul were both legislators known more for sternly saying “no” than passing laws. Like Paulites today, the Goldwater movement in the Republican Party in 1960 was “experienced by the old regulars as if it were an alien invasion,” in the words of Rick Perlstein in his great history of the Goldwater movement, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. When Goldwaterites took over state parties, like in Nebraska, the old party regulars fought back to change rules to blunt their opponents’ victory. Both candidates lived off a huge number of small donations, cared more about being right than being president, and were blessed with masses of young, passionate volunteers willing to overturn their lives to knock on doors for their man in bitter cold. Both even saw their delegates involved in scuffles where cops got called at state conventions. And both, their admirers insisted, were leaders of a new American revolution to purify and revive the first one.

From 1960 to 1964, Goldwater morphed from dangerous joke to candidate. And his ’64 defeat famously bore fruit in the form of Goldwater supporter Ronald Reagan’s rise to world power 16 years later. It’s a story whose echoes sound encouragingly in the heads of many political operatives surrounding the Paul revolution.

A more recent development in the Republican Party—and a more cautionary tale for the future of Paulism—is the aftermath of Pat Robertson’s failed 1988 run. United in outsiderhood, Paul partisans such as Drew Ivers from his Iowa operation were often former Robertson supporters. Robertson advised his people to organize and try to take over the GOP from the grassroots. Thanks to Robertson’s campaign and its aftermath, the Republican Party of the past two decades has been influenced by the Religious Right more than their raw numbers might justify.

The fate of the Christian right reveals a trap the Paul movement must avoid, even as it emulates the Christian right’s tactics of inhabiting the party from the bottom up—tactics that have given Paul forces significant control already of state parties in Iowa, Nevada, Alaska, Maine, Colorado, and Minnesota. For giving electoral fealty to the GOP without question, the religious right received little but lip service to its traditionalist ideas, and few actual achievements. The libertarian wing could easily see itself similarly neutered, voting for Romney manqués as far as the eye can see and getting in return just a contemptuous, “What are you going to do? Vote third party?”

Goldwater is not the only example of “radical outsider to candidate” in postwar American politics. While their ideology matches directly only on opposition to war, Paul’s style and success most emulates the Democratic Party’s antiwar challenger Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) from 1968. McCarthy’s youth appeal, anti-war stance, intellectuality, and fights with the party establishment on the caucus and state convention level over delegates, all track Paul’s story closely.

Both were being trounced within their own party, yet polled strongly against or ahead of their presumptive other-party competitor in the general election. Both ran more as themselves than faithful or committed Party members; Paul never endorsed Romney, and McCarthy only endorsed Hubert Humphrey grudgingly in the last week before the election.

Lawsuits over proper delegation allocation were filed on behalf of both McCarthy and Paul. Both were supported by young zealots who were willing to tear down their existing party and build it anew. Both had unconventional, intellectual political styles, and were aware that what success they had came from decentralized efforts of fans more than their own official campaigns. Both saw their active campaigns fizzle in the summer without ever dropping out, and both felt it necessary to steel their supporters for disappointment by admitting they knew they couldn’t win before it was all over (though Paul did so much earlier). And both saw their campaigns as ultimately educational, and about creating a reform movement within their respective parties.

While McCarthy himself fizzled when he tried to run again in 1972, George McGovern’s winning ’72 campaign was in most respects the rise to power of Eugene McCarthyism: anti-war, anti-establishment, and opening up the Democratic Party’s rules and delegate selection in a more populist manner.

Historical analogies don’t prove further victories for Paulism are destined; just that we know it isn’t impossible for factions seen as small, outré, failed, and repudiated to quickly dominate a political party. If Paul’s general outlook has any validity, history is on his side. The problems he and his movement provide unique insights into and solutions for—overstrained fiscal and monetary policy, overreaching foreign and domestic mission—are not likely to disappear in the next decade unless a Paul-like solution is attempted.

But his ideas won’t march on in a vacuum; actual human individuals and groups need to further them. Various possible and presumptive heirs remain or are arising in Washington—including, most literally, his son Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Ron Paul had a very precise and detailed set of positions, attitudes, and strategies that no single remaining politician shares precisely. But it’s not just Rand Paul and second-term Paul fan Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) around now; an entire mini-caucus of people Paul explicitly endorsed (which he didn’t do a lot of) are currently in D.C., including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Ted Yoho (R-Fla.), Kerry Bentivolio (R-Mich.) and Steve Stockman (R-Texas)

Most of them have already shown their insurrectionist stuff by feuding with House Speaker John Boehner, refusing to vote for his preferred fiscal cliff settlement, or for his continued speakerhood. The Paul-identifieds are just one faction of a larger bunch of new Republicans who Politico is calling the “Hell, No!” caucus. They are, Politico writes, “opposed to any new spending, willing to risk default to force spending cuts, dismissive of new gun laws and deeply skeptical about immigration reform…. Many in the media…often underestimate just how conservative and how impervious to criticism and leadership browbeating these members are when appraising the chances for change in the next two years.” The fact that such Paulite tendencies, at least when it comes to taxing and spending, stretch beyond his self-identified admirers is key to those tendencies sticking and thriving in the GOP.

Because, make no mistake, Paulism or even any kind of mild support for tougher, less compromising, more small-spending measures is under attack from the party and its media enablers (and even its media detractors). Amash was booted from his Budget Committee seat, and John Podhoretz in the New York Post characterized the mini-rebellion against Boehner as“cannibalism.” Michael Tomasky at Daily Beast considers them“vandals” and David Frum is appalled the Republican Party is so full of maniacs that it can’t get its members to vote for crappy bills that barely touch spending. With self-identified Tea Partiers shrinking and losing independence, there is room for a new dominant anti-establishment wing of the party, and Rand Paul and Justin Amash are well-positioned to lead it.

On the national level, a former Maine Paul delegate, a George Mason University law graduate and former U.S. Army Security and Intelligence Command man named Mark Willis, is running an insurgent campaign against Republican National Committee Chair Reince Preibus, vowing to repeal various rules passed at the Tampa convention last summer that centralize power over rules and delegates nationally. Willis vows to return power to the insurgent grassroots. But being from the Paul team does not necessarily mean one is a bomb-thrower in the party—former Paul Iowa campaign worker A.J. Spiker, who recentlywon re-election as Iowa’s state party chair (and is still dueling with the old guard), is sticking with Preibus.

The GOP is staggering, and proving itself incapable of meaningful change in the direction its core voters are supposed to care about. Some strong shift from Romney/Boehnerism is desperately needed, though some suggest instead a doubling down on the GOP’s social conservatism rather than flirting with libertarianism. Liberal journalist Peter Beinart has made a convincing case that a confused Republican Party will be primed for a convincing “political outsider” to dominate in 2016. With Ron Paul gone, few people of any political heft are more outside the general Washington attitudes about spending, taxing, and foreign policy than Rand Paul.

Ron Paul both embodied and inspired a no compromise libertarian radicalism, one that no one on the scene now fully embodies. Rand Paul upsets some of his dad’s foreign policy fans by seeming too solicitous of Israel on his trip there this week; Justin Amash admits he’d consider tax hikes as part of a serious entitlement cut deal; Kerry Bentivolio explicitly denies being a Paul guy—he’s a Reagan man. Thomas Massie told me in an interview in the forthcoming March Reason that he doesn’t want Ron Paul’s mantle.

Ron Paul is gone from American politics. But important aspects of Paulism—a willingness to seriously cut government spending and functions, an unwillingness to be a good party member at all costs, a willingness to rethink our foreign military and aid commitments and respect civil liberties—still have a scattering of staunch defenders, one of them also named Paul. And if federal irresponsibility on spending and debt continues as it seems it will, these radical solutions may start seeming sensible and necessary to more than just the 11 percent of the GOP primary voters who made Ron Paul a legend.

Jack Lew: Wrong For Treasury

By tapping Jack Lew for Treasury Secretary, President Obama selected a tax-hiking, big-spending Washington insider with ties to corporate welfare. The Senate should vote against Jack Lew’s confirmation. He is wrong for the Treasury Department and wrong for America.

Lew’s record paints a dismal picture. He played a significant role in the failed 2011 debt ceiling negotiations – which resulted in a credit downgrade, a $2 trillion debt hike, and spending cuts that were promised but never materialized.

As head of the Office of Management and Budget, Lew was the primary architect of the 2011 and 2012 Obama budgets that infamously received zero votes in the Senate.

Lew has deflected blame for the Senate’s dereliction of duty – the simple act of passing a budget – by falsely claiming the Senate requires 60 votes to pass a budget.

And Lew has shady ties to crony capitalism – President Obama’s favorite pastime. Just four days after joining the Obama administration in 2009, he received a $945,000 bonus from Citigroup – the same Citigroup that received a $45 billion dollar taxpayer bailout from the Treasury Department in 2008.

Get on the phone with your senators and tell them to vote NO during Jack Lew’s confirmation hearing.

Setting the Record Straight on Right-to-Work and Wages

One of the most dizzying economic debates today surrounds right-to-work’s effects on workers’ wages. A simple Google search on the subject reaps plenty of conflicting data about whether right-to-work laws increase or decrease worker compensation in a given state. The National Institute for Labor Relations Research, for example, reports that residents of right-to-work states earn $2,100 more on average each year than residents of other states. By contrast, the Economic Policy Institute claims the exact opposite, estimating the right-to-work residents earn $1,500 less. Who is right in this fog of contradictory data?

Granted, this is no simple riddle to solve. Considering that taxes and the cost of living varies drastically from state to state, economists must make complicated calculations to estimate which type of states really make more. It’s obvious that a worker in industrialized New Jersey would make more than one in rural Nebraska considering how much more they have to pay to get by, but that does not necessarily mean that those in the Garden State are better off without right-to-work.

Although these factors make it difficult to determine the specifics of how much right-to-work affects wages, one statistic at least can clear up the question of whether the impact is positive or negative – namely, percentage of growth in personal income by state. This statistic is neutral to variables like as taxes and cost of living that make calculations on this subject so complicated. Rather, the economic debate on right-to-work’s effects on worker compensation can be settled simply by determining if such states grow faster than their union shop counterparts.

The answer, drawn from Bureau of Economic Analysis data, is a resounding yes. From 2001 to 2011, personal income in right-to-work states grew by 19.1% after adjusting for inflation. This rate is greater than the national average of 14.8% and that of union shop states at 10.7%. The simple fact is employees’ wages in right-to-work states are growing almost twice as fast as their union shop counterparts.

This statistic is just one of many encouraging numbers about right-to-work’s contribution to a state’s overall competitiveness. The population in right-to-work states has grown 9.2% faster than union shop states over the same time period. Real gross domestic product has grown 7.7% faster. Perhaps most revealing, right-to-work states created 997,800 new private sector jobs in the past decade, while union shop states lost 2,294,000.

So, when you hear union advocates like President Obama claim that right-to-work is really “the right to work for less money,” look at facts yourself. Right-to-work economies are growing faster than their union shop counterparts, from their total employment all the way down to individual workers’ wages. When workers are given choice instead of being forced to unionize, businesses can bargain more competitively with unions – allowing both parties to reach an agreement that is best for both workers and management while keeping the company afloat. Such positive effects ripple through the economy, attracting more citizens and commerce to right-to-work states that respect workers’ choice and allow businesses the freedom to bargain without being bullied by Big Labor’s legal monopoly.

Barack Obama: ‘We don’t have a spending problem’

The media portrayal of the fiscal cliff standoff (and the debt-ceiling talks from which it sprang) generally portrayed President Barack Obama and the Democrats as pragmatists attempting to negotiate with intransigent Republican ideologues. But as ever, the stance of non-ideological problem-solving itself is rich with ideological content. For the latest example read Stephen Moore’s Wall Street Journal interview with Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio).

What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack Obama was this revelation: “At one point several weeks ago,” Mr. Boehner says, “the president said to me, ‘We don’t have a spending problem.’ ” [...]

The president’s insistence that Washington doesn’t have a spending problem, Mr. Boehner says, is predicated on the belief that massive federal deficits stem from what Mr. Obama called “a health-care problem.” Mr. Boehner says that after he recovered from his astonishment—”They blame all of the fiscal woes on our health-care system”—he replied: “Clearly we have a health-care problem, which is about to get worse with ObamaCare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem.” He repeated this message so often, he says, that toward the end of the negotiations, the president became irritated and said: “I’m getting tired of hearing you say that.”

If this quote is accurate, it is both stunning and unsurprising. Stunning, because of this chart:

Note how federal spending, adjusted for inflation, zoomed between 2001 and 2010 on such non-health-related categories as military (70.5%), “other” (64.1%), and non-defense discretionary (55.9%). Overall federal spending has exploded, from $1.77 trillion in fiscal year 2000 to $3.72 trillion in fiscal 2010. If Washington had pegged federal government growth since 2000 to the rates of inflation and population growth, we would be spending well under $3 trillion today, and talking about what to do with the surplus.

At the same time, Obama’s alleged quote is unsurprising, because a vast swath of Democrats well and truly believe that spending is not a problem.

Here’s Steve Benen, at Rachel Maddow’s blog: “Sorry, Boehner, spending isn’t the problem.” OrNew York magazine’s Jonathan Chait: “There really isn’t money to be cut everywhere….The spending cuts aren’t there because they can’t be found.” Or Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum: “We don’t have a spending problem. We have an aging problem.”

Combine that with the widespread belief, articulated most recently by Robert Reich, thatwe have no entitlements problem either, and you get a clearer picture of how federal spending could almost double in a decade in the face of progressive complaints about “austerity”: It’s because Democrats are in denial about the true cost of their (yes) ideological commitments. If we taxed Americans enough to cover the cost (or even 90 percent of the cost) of what Democrats consider the minimal level of government, the result would be recession. That should, but won’t, give big-government apologists pause.

And yes, as we’ve been reminding you for years, too many Republicans (and John Boehner in particular) have for too long effectively agreed with Jonathan Chait: There’s nothing we can cut!

Support Rep. Broun’s New Audit the Fed Bill!

On the very first day of the 113^th Congress, Georgia Congressman Paul Broun introduced legislation for a complete audit of the Federal Reserve System. This legislation will bring transparency to the central bank’s covert operations. After passing the House of Representatives in 2012 with bipartisan support, the original Audit the Fed bill was dead-on-arrival in the Senate thanks to Harry Reid and the rest of the establishment. They chose to stand with secret bailouts for the world’s most profitable companies, foreign banks, and even foreign governments instead of the people.

The Federal Reserve has nothing to do with free enterprise, entrepreneurship, or fiscal prudence. Central banking is based on bureaucratic top-down control where a few privileged bankers control the market for money. And it is through the continuous printing of dollars, Washington is able to spend recklessly while racking up a massive debt and making everyday life more expensive for working Americans.

After the 2008 bailout, the Federal Reserve finally became a political issue. Crony bankers and politically-favored firms had their balance sheets fixed while ordinary Americans faced higher food and energy prices.

It’s time for Congress to take back its Constitutional authority and shine a light on the Fed. Let’s make 2013 the year that Ben Bernanke and his friends can no longer hide! Tell your representative in the House to support Congressman Broun’s Audit the Fed bill!

Click here to send a message to your representative.

Fiscal Cliff Deal Doesn’t Fix The Problem

The last-minute deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff suffers from some of the worst ailments of Washington’s backroom deals.  Primarily, it does not address the nation’s fiscal imbalance because it allows taxes to go up but fails to tackle the true driver of our economic woes: runaway government spending.  Not surprisingly, President Obama has already stated that he wants to raise taxes again next year too.

The package is being rushed through at the last minute, possibly voiding the Speaker’s promise that the country would be able to review legislation for three days before the House voted on it.  Much like the President’s health care law, it looks like we’ll have to pass the tax bill to find out what’s in it.

Worst of all, the deal allows taxes to rise in a weak economy, something economists across the ideological spectrum counsel against.  Taxes are going up across the economy:

• Capital taxation is rising as taxes in President Obama’s health care law take effect.
• Labor taxation is going up and not just on top earners.  The payroll tax reduction is expiring for 160 million American workers, exposing the falsity that President Obama and Congress are protecting middle-income workers.
• Consumption taxation is rising as the health care law slaps a 2.3-percent tax on medical devices.
• Not even death can escape higher taxes; the immoral double and triple taxation from the death tax is going up five percentage points next year.

Thankfully, low marginal rates for some are being made permanent and the alternative minimum tax is finally being fixed for good, avoiding the yearly race to “patch” the income thresholds.  Capital gains and dividend rates are being held down to a reasonable level and made permanent as well.

Details on “business extenders” remain unclear.  However, reports indicate that the distortionary wind production tax credit will not only be extended but expanded so that even more uneconomical, unreliable electricity will be produced.

In the end, the country’s economic policies will take a turn for the worse as the calendar flips to 2013.  Taxes will be higher, economic growth will be burdened and the nation’s budget will still not be fixed.

Nonsense: In the Face of the Fiscal Cliff, Obama Signs Executive Order to Raise Washington Salaries

What’s that? You haven’t received a raise at work during this economy even though you are …doing your job? Not the case for the guys in the bubble known as Washington.

Via the Weekly Standard:

President Barack Obama issued an executive order to end the pay freeze on federal employees, in effect giving some federal workers a raise. One federal worker now to receive a pay increase is Vice President Joe Biden.

According to disclosure forms, Biden made a cool $225,521 last year. After the pay increase, he’ll now make $231,900 per year.

Members of Congress, from the House and Senate, also will receive a little bump, as their annual salary will go from $174,000 to 174,900. Leadership in Congress, including the speaker of the House, will likewise get an increase.

It’s not a ton of money, but a raise for the people already making 6-figures that have unsuccessfully found any level of compromise in order to avoid the fiscal cliff that will affect every single American? How much more out of touch could these people be? What a slap in the face to American taxpayers.

Ron Paul Hits NRA: “School shootings, no matter how horrific, do not justify creating an Orwellian surveillance state in America.”

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), departing Congress, reminds us of his ineffable Ron Paul-ness with a great statement on his House web site both defending gun rights and attacking the right-wing hysteria response via Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association (NRA) (taken apart ably by Jacob Sullum here last week) of armed government guards in every school:

The impulse to have government “do something” to protect us in the wake national tragedies is reflexive and often well intentioned.  Many Americans believe that if we simply pass the right laws, future horrors like the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting can be prevented.  But this impulse ignores the self evident truth that criminals don’t obey laws.

The political right, unfortunately, has fallen into the same trap in its calls for quick legislative solutions to gun violence.  If only we put armed police or armed teachers in schools, we’re told, would-be school shooters will be dissuaded or stopped.

While I certainly agree that more guns equals less crime and that private gun ownership prevents many shootings, I don’t agree that conservatives and libertarians should view government legislation, especially at the federal level, as the solution to violence.  ’

Paul points out, as he also did in his bravura farewell speech to Congresslast month, that:

Real change can happen only when we commit ourselves to rebuilding civil society in America, meaning a society based on family, religion, civic and social institutions, and peaceful cooperation through markets.

Paul goes on to point out, as one of the only men in public life who would, that government itself is a machine of violence, fingering drone strikes, and he alienates both standard left and right in his effortless way by condemning government for both “endless undeclared wars abroad and easy abortion at home.”

He then laments the mindset that would turn Sandy Hook into an excuse for further tightening a

world of police checkpoints, surveillance cameras, metal detectors, X-ray scanners, and warrantless physical searches?  We see this culture in our airports: witness the shabby spectacle of once proud, happy Americans shuffling through long lines while uniformed TSA agents bark orders.  This is the world of government provided “security,” a world far too many Americans now seem to accept or even endorse.  School shootings, no matter how horrific, do not justify creating an Orwellian surveillance state in America.

Paul winds up with the very important point that seeking the phantasm of total security through government inspection and control is a clear path to a “totalitarian society” that would “claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens lives.”

This statement, especially considering that he didn’t have to make it and it will surely annoy many in what might be considered his natural audience (Second Amendment absolutists) is a marvelous example of Paul’s style as a politician. He was in the political game to root his opposition to government in an opposition to violence and control in all its forms, not just as a culture war game of fighting perceived enemies on the “other side.” (i.e., those damn liberals!)

Paul’s statement on Sandy Hook also shows the moral coherence of his libertarian politics and his foreign policy stance, a meshing that alas seemed to confuse many GOP voters, and is another reminder of how much his voice in Congress will be missed.

Right-To-Work’s Freeloader Fairytale

Union members from around the country rally at the Michigan State Capitol to protest a vote on Right-to-Work legislation December 11. (Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

Michigan’s historic passage of right-to-work on Wednesday is a victory not only over forced unionization but over misinformation as well. For decades, union bosses and their political puppets have spread half-truths and straight-up lies in a desperate attempt to shift public opinion towards saving union-shop laws – where workers are compelled to pay dues whether they like it or not.

One of these myths was expressed by President Barack Obama on a trip last week to the Daimler Detroit Diesel plant in Redford, Michigan. Before a packed factory of union supporters, the Commander-in-Chief claimed that right-to-work laws “take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions.”  This statement makes it seem as if right-to-work is an all-out prohibition on unionization, which could not be farther from the truth.

In reality, right-to-work offers employees the choice to join a union and “bargain for better wages and working conditions.” Union enthusiasts can still join and sing “Solidarity Forever” if it fits their fancy.

The second myth that often surrounds right-to-work battle is the claim that workers who opt out of paying dues are “freeloaders.” After all, these workers are usually still represented by the union at the bargaining table even if they choose not to join. In such a case, they reap the benefits of collective bargaining without incurring the costs – a classic free-rider problem.

The [National Labor Relations Act] does not require unions to bargain as exclusive representatives. It enables them to do so — an important difference. Unions may bargain on behalf of every worker in the company. But the Supreme Court has ruled that the NLRA’s protections are “not limited to labor organizations which are entitled to recognition as exclusive bargaining agents of employees . . . ‘Members only’ contracts have long been recognized” (Retail Clerks v. Lion Dry Goods, 1962). Unions can negotiate contracts that apply only to dues-paying members and exclude non-dues-paying members.

Thus, the supposed free-rider problem only arises in private sector labor relations when a unionchooses to exclusively represent non-union workers as well. Employees who opt-out of paying dues have no say in the matter at all. Rather, private sector unions almost always choose to represent non-members as well to maximize their influence at the bargaining table. After all, representing everybody has more pull in mediation than only representing some.

As for the public sector, it is true that right-to-work preserves exclusive representation among government employees who opt out of unions. But, again, this is not the fault of the workers. States could construct their public labor laws to only permit members-only bargaining agreements if they so choose. But, they don’t because, again, unions are incentivized to be the exclusive representative in collective bargaining.

In short, if unions truly did not want to represent so-called “freeloaders,” they could well do so by insisting on members-only contracts in both the private and public sector. Perhaps such a policy would make more workers stick to their unions by paying dues and reaping the rewards of collective bargaining. Or, perhaps union membership will dwindle even further as non-members realize that they can do just fine on their own two feet.

Either way, unions should not be afraid of members-only agreements if they truly believe they’re good for workers and their members will stand by their side without force. But, until then, they have no right to complain about a freeloader fairytale.