Ozimek defends his stand against public sector unions:
In the debate over public sector unions a lot of liberals have been arguing that they are a positive political counterweight to corporate interests and a defender of the working man, and without them democracy will fail, the American Dream will die, and the earth will drift into the sun… or something like that. I recently provided an example via twitter that I thought demonstrated this isn’t always the case: teacher union opposition to charter school caps, which you’d hardly call good for working class people.
Kevin Drum responded that a single incidence of union political malfeasance doesn’t make them bad overall. Well that would indeed be a silly argument to make, and were this the only example of unions being on the wrong side of educational reform then that clearly would be the argument I was making. But do I really have to run down the litany of bad policies unions have fought to keep and good policies they’ve fought against in education reform?
... [M]y opposition to unions can stand alone on economics alone: they’re an anti-competitive cartel, it’s as economically undesirable as any other cartel. It’s union defenders who need to appeal to the political power of unions to explain their desirability.