Free Radical

President Obama recently made the following snide comment regarding the “right to work” law that Michigan recently passed.

What it’s really about is, giving you the right to work for less money.”

To which I reply (and I wish others who support such laws would also reply) yes, Mr. President, you’ve got it exactly right.  It is about giving people the right to work for less money.  Shouldn’t people be allowed to work for any amount of money they are willing to work for?  The way unions raise wages is by restricting the workforce.  Take away this power to prohibit people from working without union permission and more people will work, unemployment will be lower, and the country will be more productive.

The economics is pretty simple here but the more important issue is the moral question.  Doesn’t freedom include the ability to trade my own labor?  As usual, the argument from the left is a pretty simple distortion of the notion of “rights.”  The President talks about “taking away your right to bargain collectively.”  But nobody is proposing a prohibition on collective bargaining.  The only thing they are doing is taking away the “right” to force people into a collective that they don’t want to be a part of, the “right” to take money from people for causes they don’t support, and, yes, the “right” to keep people from voluntarily choosing to work for “too little money.”