NYC transit strike

New York City MTA transit workers have gone on strike — virtually shutting the city down.

I say good for them! I wish you luck, folks. If, as reports indicate, your strike is illegal — I’ll only respect you that much more.

Markets work (to the degree that they are free) because people have enough good sense to reliably pursue their own best interests. Furthermore, there are problems of knowledge scarcity that indicate that only individuals can be well suited to determining, or even defining, what their own best interests are. The fact that all individuals ethically have as much right as anybody else to band together to peacefully pursue their mutual interests doesn’t change when they put on a bus drivers uniform.

Some people don’t see it that way. A correspondent who sent me the above link to the Yahoo News story on this strike called the transit workers “assholes”. Even worse, the story itself quotes a consumer inconvenienced by the fact that the workers who serve her needs on a daily basis are people too — with their own lives, goals, needs and conflicts (such as this one with MTA):

“It’s a form of terrorism, if you ask me,” said Maria Negron, who walked across the bridge.

Fuck! At this rate, all the fat ladies who wear spandex to go shop at Wal-mart will end up being called “terrorists”. Esthetically speaking, there might be a better case for that.

If it’s such a big deal that MTA workers are on strike because of a dispute with MTA honchos…

Then why not just take some other company’s bus to work?

Ohhhh! The MTA is a government monopoly? And how’s that the workers fault, exactly?

It’s not.