Brooks Bayne

Breaker, Breaker, 1-9…Where’s My Social Justice, Good Buddy?

Over the weekend, in Seattle’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade, a local Teamsters union rolled a semi like the above toy truck, given as a prize in their golf tournament last summer, with the words, “Fighting for economic & social justice”, on the side of the trailer. I haven’t been able to turn up an image of the full-sized version from the parade yet, but I’ll update here when I do.

Fidel Castro said, “The Cuban revolution can be summed up as an aspiration for social justice…”. We’ve seen how Cuba’s fared since Castro’s been in power. Lenin didn’t have any better luck with his communist Soviet Union either. The term “justice” by itself sounds innocuous enough, but what exactly is social justice in the context of modern union labor?

For that we’d have to look for a Marxist who was an early influencer in the trade unionist circles to get the most undiluted perspective. Enter Harry Quelch. Quelch, born in England in 1858, was a self-taught, self-described Marxist. Quelch was a personal friend of Vladimir Lenin (Lenin eulogized Quelch in his Bolshevik papers when he died). Additionally, Harry’s son formed the Communist Party of Great Britain. Obviously, this guy was a progressive’s wet dream.

In 1907, a few years before his death in 1913, Harry wrote a piece titled, “Monarchy and Debt”, that was featured in the “Social Democrat”, a leading Communist rag back in the day. In this piece Harry wrote:

…we can have nothing to fear from the changes in these relations resulting from the substitution of social justice for the gross class injustice which exists to-day. The demand of the Social-Democrat is for such a complete change in economic conditions as will secure work for all, wealth for all, leisure for all, pleasure for all, and the opportunity for a higher development…

There’s nothing more preposterous, and antithetical to the American worldview, than a belief that work, wealth, leisure and pleasure should be guaranteed as rights. Naturally, these crazy socialist notions were birthed in foreign lands far from the Land of Liberty. The founders of this nation understood what the purveyors of Marxism did not. Here in America, there are no Constitutional rights to work, wealth, leisure, or pleasure – the Guarantor of Rights doesn’t promise these things either, but, as many of us thankfully know, rather mandates life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The foolish progressive, utopian ideas have no basis in reality. In fact, these ideas blatantly ignore man’s nature as evidenced over the course of human history. Man has never been successful at securing these extra-Constitutional privileges as rights. The reason these privileges have failed to be secured as rights is due to free men being too self-determined to lay down their lives for another man’s leisure or pleasure.

I wonder if modern American union members, and other individuals and groups in this country, who keep pushing for unionized labor, “social justice”, and wealth redistribution, understand that these are communist tenets as did the “Red Hero”  Teamsters (self-described American communists) who participated in the Minneapolis Truckers Strike in 1934.  Are they really “Fighting for economic & social justice”? If so, then we can categorize them correctly as communists and disregard anything they have to say, as they are subversives who want to undermine the American way of life. If not, it’s time to start educating them because they’re embarrassing themselves, and the country in which they live, by ignorantly continuing to support such fallacy. 

Here’s a thought. If you want to drive a truck for a living, buy your own truck. You could then set your own prices for each load you carry and you wouldn’t have to pay those silly union dues that end up lining the pockets of the union bosses.

Hey, Teamsters, you got your ears on?

(H/T yaygrr for the heads-up. He was honeymooning in Seattle over the weekend. Congrats!)