Right to Work Country

Hadley Arkes, truly a teacher of the highest order, explains the irony that has become the celebration of Labor Day.  Our understanding of the "rights of workers" centers on rights that are doled out by the state, not on the rights that are present before the creation of government--rights that are natural to us as human beings.

Arkes shines here:

"Strangely lost from memory here is the fact that the first opposition to unions in the courts came from the judges who had come out of the anti-slavery moment. Justice John Harlan, the great dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson on racial segregation, put the argument on unions most clearly in the case of Adair v. U.S. (1908). The anti-slavery movement confirmed that the individual person was the owner of his own labor. He was not obliged to give justifications when he walked away from the employ of any man."

Lincoln taught the principle of slavery in this way: "You work; I'll eat."  The natural right to labor stems from the natural right to liberty, the principle that allows us to freely use the rights which were given to us by our Creator.  These rights are grounded upon the principle that "all men are created equal"; that we have a corresponding duty to respect the rights that every other human being possesses by nature.

The public-at-large needs to again become familiar with these teachings.