An Afghan minister who became a bicycle courier in Germany

This argument that unions somehow "artificially" increase prices doesn't hold water for a second under scrutiny.

In a free market you can see unions as an actor who sells labor. They're not opposed to a free market at all - they merely even the playing field at the negotiating table and generally make the process smoother.

You only have a problem when unions achieve a monopoly position and abuse it - same as with any other kind of actor in a free market.

> This was very much unlike the post-war period, where US industry was running on borrowed time, making increasingly burdensome concessions to unions that led to huge bankruptcies and retrenchment in the 1970s in many industries.

You mean the adjustment from the post-war period of 1945-1975? Just like the one you referenced from 1870-1900? The post-war boom in wages here, that you can see many times in history, occurs due to demographics. You are essentially arguing to the contrary of your point, that large-scale wage increases for average people translate to better outcomes for all. Higher velocity of money, more innovation. You do realize that society as a whole is a large union, correct? And if suddenly there are far less people for work, then it has the same effect as a group holding out for higher wages? That is functionally what a strike is; it's as if a large portion of the young population is all striking at once (they're in fact dead).

> massive deadweight loss from greater unrealized production/earnings

And what does this deadweight loss thing mean exactly... coming from someone who studied economics? This is completely made up, more casual libertarian groupthink from people who got rich and conveniently stop believing in society. Can we stay grounded on this board please?

>>This was a short period of massive changes to logistics (better railways), society (electric lights improved factory productivity), and what was even possible to make (improved materials and precision machining).

There have been just as many opportunities to raise productivity in modern times, with the development of computerized production, internet communication, robotics, rocketry and space-based industries, plastics, the standardized shipping container, nanotechnology, biotechnology, machine learning, distributed blockchains, etc

Nations like Hong Kong and Singapore, which maintained comparatively free-market oriented economies, and ranked number 1 and 2 in the Economic Freedom Index for decades, vastly outperformed more social democratic economies.

They not only saw vastly greater economic and wage growth, but closed the huge deficit they had with Western nations in life expectancy in 1960, and eventually surpassed them. HK and Singapore today have a higher life expectancy than even the Scandinavian countries, which in 1960 were #1, 2 and 3.

Beyond these anecdotes, you can look at basic correlations found in large datasets covering dozens of economies over a span of decades, which suggest lower government spending, as a percentage of GDP, tends to be beneficial to economic performance:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170821004405/http://ime.bg/upl...

>>You can have unions without the government mandating anything.

Unions have no power in a free market, which is why unionization rates were so low until the unions successfully hoodwinked society into believing their victim narrative, and had the government pass laws in their favor.

>>Here's an example: I know I'm worth considerably more to my employer than they're paying me, but were I to ask for appropriate compensation they'd rather let me go than pay up - because it would set a bad precedent. Any other employer I could turn to would do the same.

Or they could pay you more and require that you to not disclose your pay raise to co-workers.

If they don't pay market wages, their employees will resign to work for companies that do. There's no trick that companies can use to avoid paying market wages.

Supply and demand are the dominant forces in determining wage levels, as centuries of empirical evidence shows. The free market is quite efficient, and as a consequence, laws that violate it typically reduce efficiency.

EDIT, being rate limited so will respond to the below here:

>>There's also no such thing as laws forcing employers to negotiate with unions

Collective bargaining laws do precisely this. In the US, if the majority of a work unit votes to unionize, the company employing them MUST engage in collective bargaining with the entire work unit, and cannot fire them and replace them with workers who are not unionized.

This basic violation of contract liberty is characterized by mainstream academia and so-called civil liberties organizations like the ACLU, in Orwellian fashion, as a human right, and has become institutionalized around the world.

>>Because I've got a history book full of examples that say otherwise - of unions/guilds mattering even when facing opposition from the government.

The power of guilds came entirely from government! The defining characteristic of a guild was an association of market providers who were granted, by government authorities, a market monopoly, to the exclusion of market providers not party to the guild.

Could just be a typo or autocorrect. A spell checker with no grammar features will not catch this since both are words.