UPS to Washington: please hobble FedEx! — VOICES for REASON

What can brown do for you? Well, if you’re FedEx, it can lobby Washington to strangle you with pro-union legislation.

House Transportation Chairman James Oberstar (D., Big Labor) last year slipped 230 words into a spending bill that would make it easier for the Teamsters to unionize FedEx. This ambush was included at the urging of UPS, which has been saddled with the Teamsters for decades and wants FedEx to feel its pain.

On a free market, UPS and FedEx would engage solely in economic competition, trying to outdo each other by offering the best value to customers. But when the government intervenes in markets, as it does today and has been doing for decades, it opens the door to this sort of political pseudo-competition: the attempt to pressure government into using force to provide one’s own business with special favors or one’s competitors with special burdens.

Under economic competition, everyone wins. Even if a competitor “loses” in some particular case, he benefits by living in a free, productive economy. But under political, or pseudo-competition, everyone loses–even those who “win” in some particular case. We’re all forced to pay higher prices, to accept fewer opportunities, to resign ourselves to a lower standard of living.

What we need to be asking is: Why does the government have any say in this matter? Why can’t FedEx and its employees be free to decide voluntarily the terms under which employees can unionize? Why doesn’t Washington put an end to political competition by returning to the role the founders envisioned for it: the protection of individual rights.

Image: flickr