> Unions would provide no benefit to their members if they negotiated collectively for the national workforce. It's the zero-sum rent-seeking that they engage in that benefits their members, when they force an employer to negotiate with the subset of the workforce that they represent, to the exclusion of all other workers.
That's absurd, the only way this was true was if the amount of money that companies could spend on labor was completely fixed, and the only way to get a larger wage would be for somebody else to get a smaller wage.
Yes, companies could be forced to spend more on labor in the short run, but that's a Faustian bargain that harms all parties in the long run.
Artificially higher wages at the expense of lower profit margins means lower volumes of investment, which reduces long-term productivity/wage growth. I recommend you read this 1957 book, Why Wages Rise:
This type of view of things is extremely hard to maintain considering that the last 20 years where wages have stagnated, yet productivity and profitability has been growing like crazy. Minimum wage earners have actually been dropping in pay due to deflation.
This is NOT true. First of all, you're limiting your analysis to just the US. For the world as a whole, wages have grown more over the last 30 years than in any other period in human history:
That's absurd, the only way this was true was if the amount of money that companies could spend on labor was completely fixed, and the only way to get a larger wage would be for somebody else to get a smaller wage.