RON HART: (Dis)union: Kicking the can down the road

After a two-year love affair with Obama, it’s no surprise that the media are demanding some cuddling time. One of the most-watched shows on TV recently was Barack Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview.

This was probably because America was getting quite curious as to what the “change” he proposed in his campaign was all about.

For us males, the thing about Obama being the most powerful man in the world is that with all the force that the leader of the free world has at his disposal, he is still not powerful enough to keep his mother-in-law from moving into his new house. Even Houdini, who amazed the world with his ability to escape from any predicament, could not get out of going antiquing with his wife one weekend.

Perhaps Obama will exercise his first veto on this matter.

My guess is that he is OK with his mother-in-law moving in since she has babysat his cute girls over the years. It will save him money; otherwise he would have to hire union babysitters who cost $95 an hour and take cigarette breaks every 45 minutes.

It was good to hear Obama speak in this interview of the need for everyone to work hard and not count on the government for help.  He sounded like he might have been a good candidate to run against himself for president in 2008.

Aside from encouraging young males to pull up their pants and rediscover the belt, my hope is that he will send the message that America is a place where anything is possible for anyone willing to work. He will recognize the free market as the only mechanism we have for sustained employment and prosperity.

I hope he realizes that he must not bail out the bad business model that is the “Big Three” automakers.  Giving a business that is burning $2 billion a month in cash an infusion of $25 billion just buys a year of time before it faces the reality of economic Darwinism.

The U.S. automakers are simply no longer car companies.

They are union-ravaged dinosaurs that will continue to get clobbered by leaner and non-union, Southern-made cars manufactured by foreign companies. Rest assured, the unions and their cronies are looking for jobs in America, not work.

Work can only be measured by an open and free market demand for it.

The economy prices work, except in the case of unions that demand more than the market is willing to pay. Over time, this dynamic cannot stand up when others are willing to do a better job for less money. Only through the force of government can this continue, but never forever.

I cannot name an industry with a heavily unionized workforce that has prospered over time.

All work is a monetary exchange, valued by others, traded daily in exchange for the work of another person. There is nobility in all work; in modern society, it defines man.

Unions tend to make their work a commodity, not differentiating by quality but by sameness. The old saying is that if you think you are indispensable, place your finger into a glass of water (the economy) then remove it, and note the hole you have left. The size of that hole is the measure of your indispensability.

Competition will always fill market demands, especially in labor. Artificially mispricing labor makes a country uncompetitive.

What Obama will find in his first economics lesson is that GM is not a car company; it is a universal health care company that makes cars as a front.

GM starts each car with an embedded union benefits cost of $1,600. It pays its union workers $78 an hour; non-union Southern automakers like Nissan, Toyota and the like pay their workers about $48 per hour — and they make better cars.

Voters will vote with emotion, but they spend their money with economic reason. If someone else makes a better product, they will buy it.

So, after the bank bailout has been so successful, Congress lines up the auto executives like crash test dummies and grills them before giving them their allowance. I hope no one missed the hypocrisy of Congress lecturing executives on how to operate a financially sound endeavor.

True to form, the UAW announced Saturday that they will not make any concessions on benefits or wages to help their struggling companies.

I say put them through Chapter 11 so they can fire shiftless workers and get the economics of their business corrected.

We really have not heard much from the air traffic controllers union since Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 of them in 1981.

Ron Hart is a southern libertarian humorist who can be reached at: RevRon10@aol.com