[Truth To Power]

Yes, because when they were given the choice 130 years ago, socialists and the unions consciously chose to pursue privilege and spurn justice. Now socialism is mouldering on the scrap heap of history, and unions are already waiting at the curb to be hauled away.

Union members fought and died

So did the Grand Army. So do the Taliban. Fighting and dying just means you haven't the intellectual courage to resist demagoguery and find a better way.

against corporate mercenaries in America's longest running war (the labor wars lasted most of a century). As was inevitable, they were defeated by superior force and capital's access to arms, men, and money,

Oh, nonsense. They were defeated because the great majority of working people realized full well that the extreme, violent elements of the union movement were in the wrong.

not by the intellectual rigor of libertarian oratory.

There's been no intellectual rigor on either side. That is very much the point. The socialists pretend capital is land to justify stealing capital, and the capitalists pretend land is capital to justify stealing land. There's no intellectual rigor or even respectability in such pretenses.

Go ahead and dance on the graves of the union men, but if you ever demand of yourself the merest fraction of the courage they demanded of themselves I will be astonished.

Any fool can fight. We saw that yesterday in Pakistan. Millions of men have "courageously" fought in wars they didn't understand, and which were being prosecuted for aims contrary to their own interests, and that includes most of those who fought for socialism and union privilege. What takes real courage is to think when others are too afraid of the truth to think.

Privilege will never be voluntarily stripped away from capital.

Well, we have the example of slavery. Sometimes it was removed peacefully, sometimes violently, but no, never voluntarily.

Not by hook or crook, but only by force.

In most cases slavery was removed by peaceful changes to law, not violent revolution or civil war. We can admire or even revere Spartacus, but it was people like William Wilberforce who actually got the job done, without ever taking up arms. The intellectual battle against privilege is the less dramatic, but nevertheless the more important one.

This is is close to God's honest truth as I can come after 65 years of trying.

Try harder. Try thinking more clearly, deeply, and honestly than you ever have before. Then you may aspire to my level of insight.

You're on the side of the common man or you're not, and you are not.

That is correct, because I am on the side of liberty, justice, and truth, which will ultimately benefit the common man more than any amount of unconditional support. Being on the side of the common man means taking the common man's side even when he is wrong, and in the wrong. That is ultimately self-defeating, and I will not do it.