"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
Right-To-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition
"It’s not widely known, but an earlier generation of libertarians condemned so-called right-to-work laws as anti-market. For example, Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, compared right-to-work to anti-discrimination laws. The Spring 1966 issue of the libertarian student-run journal New Individualist Review carried Professor Hirschel Kasper’s article “What’s Wrong with Right-to-Work Laws.” NIR was edited by University of Chicago libertarians Ralph Raico, Joe Cobb, and Jim Powell. Among its editorial advisers were Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ben Rogge, a classical liberal long associated with the Foundation for Economic Education. (Of course this does not mean that any of these men necessarily agreed with Kasper, although [with one exception] that may not be an unreasonable inference, considering that NIR never published a pro-right-to-work article. The exception is Hayek, who wrote, curiously, in The Constitution of Liberty that “closed- and union-shop contracts … must be treated as contracts in restraint of trade and denied the protection of the law.”)"
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