I’m constantly baffled how Europeans, who get paid 50-60% as much as Americans, and have almost no innovative companies of their own, think their system is somehow better.
I’m referring to unionization, since this is the topic of the post, but also the broader idea of top-down market regulation that includes provisions for workers rights and taxation of externalities, driven by generally left-leaning, anti-capitalist sentiment. In general, it seems Europeans expect more of their government than Americans do. Historically, Americans have tended to be more distrustful of their government, believing that the less it gets involved in their affairs, the better.
This distrust of government pushed the US toward a generally laissez-faire approach to regulation, while most European countries have gone the opposite direction. The approaches differ in terms of workers rights, labor laws, and taxation. Specifically, as a simple example, in the US, you can fire somebody whenever you want. Generally speaking, taxes are lower, it’s easier to start a company, and the regulatory environment is friendlier to business models driven by venture capital.
I’m arguing that it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the US has produced more innovation and economic capital than European countries, partially because the regulatory environment is friendlier and more encouraging of risk.
No change to the American system is being proposed. They are instead advocating that workers use the rights they have already been assigned, the same rights that have been exercised in many other American industries (electrical, auto, steel, etc) to form unions.
Unionization is the topic of the post, but workers' rights are not ontologically related to statism. There are plenty of libertarian socialists and plenty of authoritarian capitalists. Some of your points are non sequitur as a result. To this point, though:
"I’m arguing that it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the US has produced more innovation and economic capital than European countries, partially because the regulatory environment is friendlier and more encouraging of risk."
I tend to agree, but that's not really what's at stake for businesses facing organized labor. After WWII, the (capitalist) USA controlled about half of the world's wealth and was home to a robust labor movement. In many ways the American labor movement between ca. 1850 and 1960 was hugely influential in the Western world, including and especially Western Europe. During that time, American businesses produced an astonishing amount of inventions. For these historical reasons, I think the narrative about America's relationship to organized labor is far more complex than you've asserted, unless we're supposed to pretend that American history only dates back to the Reagan administration.
