I think a lot of that in the US got spun up with Nixon, Reagan brought a lot of it to the mainstream though. Both of them hated unions with a passion that is for sure.
Unions are the best of all the bad solutions we’ve come up with so far for labor to compete with capital. The worst of course is collectivism through government, though that’s being tried again…
The best solution is antitrust enforcement and removal of anti-competitive laws/rules lobbied for by incumbents. When companies have to compete with each other for labor and customers, wages go up and prices go down. Whey they consolidate they can charge monopoly rents.
Unions often even make this worse because they'll latch on to a monopolistic employer and then lobby with them to retain the monopoly at the expense of all the workers who are their customers rather than their employees.
> removal of anti-competitive laws/rules lobbied for by incumbents.
If even if there are such ideas in new government, they quickly disappear over wine and steak dinners with the lobbyists.
Unfortunately this is not seen as bypass of democratic process. Nobody voted for having less rights and any bargaining power stripped and yet here we are.
That's where security services should come in (in many countries protection of democracy is their main statutory duty) - but they are not doing their job tax payers pay them to do.
Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it's hard to enact is defeatism. When it's the thing you need to do you need to do it anyway. It's not like anything else that would actually work would be easier to pass -- the thing you want is the thing they don't want.
Sure there are a number of Democratic Socialists and other progressives winning elections and driving changes but everything I’ve seen policy-wise has been directly targeted areas where unchecked capitalism has clearly failed their constituents. Even in those cases, there’s no dramatic shift towards government ownership.
> there’s no dramatic shift towards government ownership
Interesting that you mention this. It's not exactly the same thing, but someone in another thread here on HN pointed out that the feds have been acquiring non-trivial stakes in a number of companies. More than just the one or two that I had seen in headlines.
It's funny, because it's a bigger overt push in the direction of actual socialism than the dems have ever tried, by the group of people who most love to use socialism as a boogeyman.
But the argument in favor of it seemed compelling on it's face, at least worthy of debate.
