There seems to me to be a lot of equivocation in all these replies between &quot;unions&quot; and &quot;employees&quot;, substituting whichever one makes the best argument at the time. That&#x27;s not valid. When discussing &quot;governments negotiating with unions&quot;, you can&#x27;t just suddenly substitute &quot;government negotiating with employees individually&quot;; the incentives are not the same.<p>The governments have little incentive to pay a given individual; they have a lot of incentive to pay blocks of voters, and the especially have a lot of incentive to do so with money from the future, a point I note none of the replies cared to engage with, which I find is a big tell. Since a huge element of the problem with public unions was the enormous pension giveaways, which are now coming due and crushing the ability of the &quot;blue model&quot; to keep the rest of its promises. While everyone here is fiddling, the cities are burning.<p>You can&#x27;t write about these issues as if we&#x27;re debating <i>creating</i> public unions for the first time and seeing what happened. We <i>created</i> them. They <i>are</i>, present tense, in the process of crushing city finances, in the most concretely real, dollar-based, actually happening way possible. This is a present fact that must be accounted for, not a hypothetical bad thing that may happen in the future. Unfortunately, yelling &quot;Oh, those wacky libertarians! Well, that concludes that debate.&quot; doesn&#x27;t add a single dollar to the tax base.