Before I get to a particularly bad article from The Freeman, let me again plug Thaddeus Russell's A Renegade History of the United States. I'm three chapters in and even if Dr. Russell spent the remainder of the book discussing his belly button it'd still be the best book on American history I've read in a very long time.
Moving along, today Charles Baird covered himself in fail sauce over at The Freeman with this column purporting to analyze private sector unionism. Because he is desperately ignorant, he actually sees the establishment of the NLRB as a victory for the labor movement, rather than what it really was- fitting a bridle to a horse that had been thoroughly broken by government violence over the preceding fifty years. Somehow this professor of economics is blissfully unaware of the long, bloody history of attempts at establishing real unions and the extraordinarily vicious state repression that smashed these attempts. From the strikes of 1819 to Bloody Harlan, Dr. Baird sees only "union cronies" who needed the government to secure any real power. No, Dr. Baird. All the workers ever needed was for the state to stop sending goons out to break their heads.
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