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.
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Heh. Why am I not surprised that you and Jane Galt take diametrically opposite views to this?
Seriously though, aren’t there inherent monopoly problems in most public (as in moving lotsa people in a city as opposed to governmental) transportation systems? For such services to be useful, you will need a powerful interconnected network that works together rather than compete with each other. They broke up the rail system in England, which transformed the system from one big gov monopoly to lots of itty bitty private monopolies resulting in some lines being even worse run than others. But commuters don’t get to choose to take a better-run line — they’ll take the line that runs close to their house and like it.
I briefly lived in one of the suburbs of London earlier this year. The trains were miserable — running late, seriously delayed, or (in a couple of memorable occurances) not at all.
Why am I not surprised that you and Jane Galt take diametrically opposite views to this?
That is left as an exercise for the reader. :)
Seriously though, aren’t there inherent monopoly problems in most [mass] transportation systems?
I’m eager to answer this, but it’s going to take a long post. More later.
[...] In a comment on my post about the NYC transit strikeNYC transit strike, Battlepanda asked about monopoly problems as a response to my pointing out that the massive disruption of urban life accompanying the strike was due to the MTA being a government monopoly. [...]
[...] In a comment on my post about the NYC transit strike, Angelica of the Battlepanda blog asked about monopoly problems as a response to my pointing out that the massive disruption of urban life accompanying the strike was due to the MTA being a government monopoly. [...]