Wobblies Wobble but they don’t Fall Down:

How fitting that as New York City recently came to a halt because of a strike by the transit union, the 100-year-old Industrial Workers of the World union (IWW or Wobblies) has come back alive after being left for dead. The New York Sun is today reporting that the radical socialist union, which currently has 2,000 members in North America, has resurfaced in New York convincing workers to walk of the job on Monday at a wholesale company.

Maybe the workers (many who are illegal immigrants) were inspired by the TWU or maybe they truly believe that the IWW’s idea that the workers of the world could organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth, can work. Whatever it was, the obvious truth is that like the IWW of old, the new version will fall on its face.

I wonder when they say “live in harmony with earth” if they mean going back to the days of the caveman because that is how we would need to live in order not to violate any of their other principals. The truth is every invention known to man has come as a result of the greed or drive that the brilliant on this planet posses. Does the IWW believe that under their world somebody would become a brain surgeon working 12 hours a day not to mentioned all the time learning to become one only to be compensated as the same person driving a bus? No they wouldn’t. Life progresses and develops out of greed, which in the end benefits all of man, whether it is thanks to the invention of medicines or flight. Companies like Johnson & Johnson spend billions of dollars a year on research for new medicines that have allowed us to live longer for the goal of profit. Without the potential for profits companies like this wouldn’t exist and neither would the medicines.

Sure they want to take possession of the means of production, production that was already invented by somebody else who thought they would get rich off of it. If their strategy is so great why don’t they invent their own, wholesale company, restaurant, or pharmaceutical company to live in peace with earth. Why, because the brains they would need to do it would never sign on.

Wobblies, anarchists, socialists, and anti-capitalists will come, go and come again, but capitalism, the drive to be rich and selfish is what will move society forward and everyone better off.

Once again…

“Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment with is most advantageous to society.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.