Mike Bednarz says:: In my vision a pure capitalism, government regulation of all business would be done away with, including the business done between a company and its employees. A union, like capitalism is self-regulationg free entity; If a union becomes totally out of whack, its members are not obligated to cooperate with it (although many times they will anyways.)
Mike's vision of "pure captialism" appears to be based on two important pieces of government regulation: 1) the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 (or was it '48?), which protected unions from the sort of "anti-trust" suit lodged against them in the 1930s, when the courts invoked the 1907 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and decreed that unions were illegal conspiracies in restraint of trade, i.e. each company's right to trade wages for labor individually with each employee instead of having to deal with a union. (Here it is also useful to remember that the Feds merely declared war on the unions before 1907, and sent the troops out.) The legality of unions was thus legislated into existence. And 2) the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, where the Supreme Court decreed that a corporation was a legal person, whereas previously a corporation was viewed merely as a construct of the government. This previous conception of the corporation was invoked by Adam Smith in THE WEALTH OF NATIONS in his argument for why corporations were bad for his version of "pure capitalism." Well, guess what? Corporations are still a government-granted perk.
Finally, it must be remembered that the current period of US high-intensity consumerism was made possible by the deficit the Federal Government ran to fight World War II, which got America out of the Great Depression. (And don't forget the Marshall Plan, which did the works for Europe and Japan.) In summary, the creation of Mike Bednarz's version of "pure capitalism" is historically traceable to specific acts of government activity. (Frankly, I'd like to hear what would happen if Mike Bednarz read Keynes' THE GENERAL THEORY...)
