That's about as dispositive as me mentioning a bunch of optimistic inventors of construction equipment who had no regard for the safety of workers and killed people.

Despite that I said he might well be right. He just hasn't cited anything that shows it. I'm a business owner in New York City too, stories are cheap.

The reflexive statement that unions are what's getting in the way of fearless capitalist innovators is, in fact, a well financed argument that is harming our society and increasing inequality and political unrest.

If labor unions are the source of problems, Paris, Madrid and Barcelona would have the same problems but orders of magnitude worse. Yet the comment claims -- and note I'm not passing judgment on whether this is factual or not -- that Paris, Madrid and Barcelona do not have these problems.

And it most certainly is true that labor unions in the US have been targeted by ubiquitous, well-funded, vicious attack propaganda from those who feel that people pooling a resource to wield greater power and reap greater returns than they could individually is the highest, noblest and holiest human endeavor when the resource in question is capital, but is the very worst and lowest sort of corrupt vile leeching parasitism when the resource in question is labor.

Unions have done amazing things to increase worker pay and benefits up from horribly inadequate levels, and to increase safety standards. But they've also don't some pretty bad anti-competitive, rent-seeking, protectionist things as well. Getting rid of them certainly isn't the answer, but letting them do bad things is unacceptable as well.

No one is saying "everything that unions do is bad and they should go away". But it's equally naive to suggest that unions never do bad things at all.

So why is it that we get something like a thousand "look at this CORRUPT OVERPAID LAZY RENT-SEEKING UNION" stories for every "this union did something kind of OK, I guess" story?