Vin Suprynowicz

In my Jan. 9 column — “I like to pay taxes; with them I buy civilization” — I wrote: “What’s that? What about those unemployed through no fault of their own? Get rid of all the government interventions in the labor market, including payroll taxes, and jobs would sprout like fungi. Of course, they might not all be government-approved jobs.”

A loyal reader objects: “Vin Suprynowicz’s words are a code word for abolishing laws and regulations governing worker safety, pay, child labor, benefits, etc. ‘Of course they might not be government approved jobs,’ he boasts. What kind of jobs would they be? Jobs that pay $5 an hour or less? Unsafe jobs since he no doubt would abolish OSHA? Jobs where you would be forced to work a 16-hour day without overtime? Of course, he would abolish overtime and minimum wages. Jobs without vacation? Twelve-year-olds no doubt could do some jobs because the prohibition of child labor is under Suprynowicz’s way of thinking government interference in the market place.

“If you get laid off or fired, he would have no unemployment benefits. That in his reactionary mind that is an incentive not to work. How would business people find employees willing to work at non-goverment approved jobs at which the employer would pay slave wages?

“And no doubt Suprynowicz would prohibits unions so workers could not organize to improve their lot.”

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And so, in a vital first step, those indoctrinated for decades in the inevitability of having the central state dictate every aspect of our lives including our work begin to contemplate the collapse of that paradigm.

In fact, especially since the freedom of association is recognized and protected from government interference by the Constitution, trade unions are fine by me. I’d be interested to see any citation in which I’ve said otherwise.

However, since government has no delegated power to intervene in such matters, we certainly SHOULD get rid of the federal regulations that allow an outfit like the UAW to effectively bankrupt an outfit like General Motors. Current pro-union labor laws — and especially wacky, unconstitutional “bailout” interventions like the one that kept GM from shedding its unsustainable union contracts in bankruptcy — have that effect by making it virtually impossible for GM to hire replacement workers, who might not demand a level of guaranteed 40-year pensions certain to bankrupt the firm in the face of foreign competition.

Barring such federal tilting of the playing field, trade unions can rarely coerce disastrous financial concessions unless the workers have a true monopoly on rare skills.

Professional sports unions, for instance, can be quite effective.

But does OSHA help anyone in the National Football League? I suspect the NFL has some kind of exemption from OSHA regulations, or the OSHA inspectors would surely look at knee-injury and concussions statistics and require that the game be changed to “two-hand touch,” forthwith.

Why aren’t NFL players “protected” by OSHA? At the same time businesses can be fined for failing to label piles of sand as “hazardous materials” (not making that up), who else is exempt, and why? How precisely does OSHA help those who work in our most deadly professions, including deep sea fishing, cab driving, and hard-rock mining? Has OSHA been successful in requiring employers to allow cab drivers to carry handguns for self-defense? Why not? Federal regulations overrule local ordinances, don’t they? Check your 14th Amendment, enacted primarily to stop the states from disarming the minority poor.

I can find no place in the Constitution where the Congress is authorized to interfere in the labor markets, at all. Why should a 15-year-old who gets his girlfriend pregnant be barred from taking honest work so they can keep and raise the baby? Why should kids who’ll never be doctors or physicists be denied the dignity of an apprenticeship in a useful trade, simply because the government educrats have been allowed to slow down the course of schooling so today’s 15-year-old has only the education of a 10-year-old of 100 years ago?

Why should employers be barred from offering “starter” jobs to low-skilled workers at any rate agreeable to both parties?

There’s no such thing as “slave wages.” Slaves do not receive wages. If you want to earn more, develop better skills, or learn to buy and sell something else more advantageously — without a “license” or “permit.”

Why do so many trades now require government “licenses” and “permits” — all thinly disguised anti-competitive protection rackets? Today’s massive (and officially understated) unemployment rate is dramatic testimony to the real effect of these government meddlings in the market — all benefiting the labor unions and others involved in “regulatory capture,” but creating nothing but dependency and frustration for the growing class of “permanently discouraged” job-seekers.

What’s going to happen when we can no longer support them all on the dole? It’s an open secret that many now work in the benefit-free, OSHA-free “gray market,” or sell stuff Online without collecting or remitting sales taxes. What does that make a “brick-and-mortar” merchant who still obeys all those costly rules? A sucker, that’s what it makes him. A chump.

I have neither the power nor the inclination to “abolish” extra pay for overtime — I merely find no place in the Constitution where the federal government can require it. (They really don’t, by the way. I’ve worked unpaid overtime most of my adult life.) The matter is thus left subject to voluntary negotiation between worker and employer.

If businesses could hire anyone they chose, under any terms agreeable to the job-seeker, “unemployment” would virtually disappear except among those who choose not to work. Most would continue to earn far above any arbitrary “minimum wage,” as they do right now. Employees would be free to buy “unemployment insurance” on the free market if they so desire — or instead to merely set aside some of their pay (much higher pay, on average, once employers were unburdened of their current regulatory compliance costs) as “savings for a rainy day.”

Is freedom really any more frightening than the economic backlash from overregulation that we now face? Would my sneering correspondent with his scary visions of small children trapped in coal mines rather sit on the dole than go ply his trade in a truly free market?

A century ago, millions of people — including my father’s parents — gambled their all on a chance to come to this country and compete in just such an unregulated labor market. They struggled, but their grandchildren thank them. Today, talk to any small business owner about the regulators, the tax collectors, the government auditors showing up with their hands out, day after day. Given the tax and regulatory penalties imposed on such actions, you’d pretty much have to be insane to start a new business and “create jobs” in this country. This has become so clear that even Barack Obama now claims he’s going to root out and repeal any regulations that hamper business activity and job growth.

Note he “claims.” Should his minions come trooping back, advising that the most helpful steps would be to eliminate the income tax, all “payroll tax withholding,” the IRS, the EPA, the EEOC, the ADA, and Obamacare, I believe we can all predict his answer.

His answer would be to squawk, like my correspondent above, that no government edict, no matter how unconstitutional and counterproductive, may ever really be repealed, so long as the original authors took care to give it give it a nice-sounding name, and assert that it advances the cause of “economic justice.”

To finance their schemes, they gleefully seek to loot “the rich” — including business owners, Then they scratch their heads in puzzlement as the ranks of lootable businesses continues to curiously thin out, like the population of an unguarded henhouse in fox country.