Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry George

Henry George, the 19th-century political economist, warns that a union’s leverage comes from the power to inflict loss and to compel conformity. Strikes, boycotts, lockouts’ mirror image, and the closed shop all work by stopping production or by raising the cost of resisting union demands. To be effective, they must also limit the supply of competing labor: disciplining members, blacklisting strikebreakers, restricting apprentices, or imposing wage floors that exclude the least advantaged. Such methods, he argues, are inherently destructive because they achieve gains by interruption and exclusion rather than by enlarging the total product. Their successes for some workers are offset by costs shifted to others, whether unorganized labor, consumers, or the public.

Calling the organization necessarily tyrannical extends the critique to internal governance. To wield power in a standoff, a union needs iron discipline. Majorities must bind minorities; dissenters are fined or expelled; members are compelled to walk out, pay dues, and obey strike orders even when their individual circumstances differ. The same solidarity that protects the group can harden into coercion against its own. For George, that logic mirrors the domination unions resist: a different face of the same impulse to rule by force.

The point is not sympathy for capital. George championed labor and attacked the structures that kept wages low. He located the root cause in land monopoly and unearned rents, which trap workers by closing off access to the natural opportunities that would otherwise set a high wage floor. Because unions cannot raise wages economy-wide without reducing output or excluding some workers, they are at best a partial, zero-sum remedy. A just and durable elevation of labor would come, he believed, from socializing land rent through a single tax, freeing enterprise and expanding opportunity so that bargaining power rises without coercion. The line thus reads as a critique of method, not of the dignity of workers: production should be liberated, not obstructed, and justice should flow from changing the ground rules rather than from organized compulsion.