Public sector are just slime to me. Artificial labor price fixing ON TOP OF artificially high labor costs??? WTFE!

Actually, I’m not going to disagree with you nearly as much as you probably think I am. At core, much of what you say here is spot-on. I oversimplify in the post a bit, but it is obvious that there are *some* constraints on government. It’s the reason that government won’t just raise income taxes to 80% in order to fund their desires — that level would be enough to destroy their monopoly on the use of force (because the economy would go underground and the people would revolt).

That said, I have to point out a few things:

1) Governments have a monopoly on the use of force for A LOT MORE than raising revenue — they have “police powers”, for good or ill, affecting pretty much all areas of life. Sometimes that’s doing things like throwing murderers in jail. Sometimes that’s shooting innocent citizens as “collateral damage” in the drug war — the power to make drug use illegal itself an abrogation of power well beyond that of taxation.

2) Governments also have a territorial monopoly on these functions. There are conglomerates such as Great Britain, Mexico, China, etc… If I don’t like the USA’s services, I can’t decide I want to switch to China’s services without picking up and moving a few thousand miles.

What you say is mostly correct — there are a lot of similarities between governments and corporations that are overlooked. It’s also true that a lot of free-market libertarians excuse behavior from corporations that is identical to behavior they’d decry from governments. But there are some critical differences, and those differences make it impossible to suggest that the only differences are “their names and how they’re viewed by the masses”.

they’ve got ample reasons to be especially critical of public sector unions, as the natural check on their outrageous demands (i.e. the market) doesn’t exist for government.

I used to be the kind of free-market libertarian that I think you probably are. Used to. I am no more. Why? Because I came to realize something that quite a few (if not the vast majority of) free-market libertarians have yet to realize, which is that governments don’t exist outside of the market and aren’t different from corporations in any way other than the fact that they use force as a means of gaining revenue. You yourself treat governments and corporations as though they are two different things; they aren’t. Governments are simply a specific kind of corporation. What separates them from all others is that they’ve secured a monopoly on the use of violence as a means of securing revenue. That’s it. All of the services that governments provide to people who, for the most part, never asked for them and many times would rather they weren’t provided can be and have been provided by the private sector. Governments are simply massive conglomerates whose names are United States, Great Britain, Mexico, Canada, China, and so on. They are parent companies of companies called Department of Defense, Department of Agriculture, Department of Homeland Security, and so on (though the names may change, the functions typically remain the same). The parent companies have board members called legislators and executives called executives and internal dispute resolution services called courts. There’s no real difference between governments and corporations other than their names and how they’re viewed by the masses.

The market does impose checks on governments – it’s called collapse. Though it doesn’t happen nearly as frequently as it does with private-sector corporations (because there are fewer of them), it does happen with regularity. Maybe you’ve heard of a couple governments that have collapsed? Sometimes they collapse for economic reasons. Sometimes they collapse because they were violently overthrown by competing governments (which were sometimes erected by people who they claimed as their market base). However you refer to it, it’s a market function because the market is humanity and ALL governments are simply groups of people out of the whole of humanity who are operating within the larger market.

Again, I’m not opposed to public workers unionizing based on them “working for us”. I’m opposed to public workers unionizing because we, as voters and taxpayers, don’t exert an effective control over what those working for us are paid.

In much the same way as common (voting) stockholders of a corporation don’t have much control over its day-to-day operations, individual voters & taxpayers don’t have much control over how a government is run. But unlike selling the shares of a company that you believe is being poorly run, it’s difficult to “sell” your share of your government’s spending…

Either they don’t understand economics, or the union leadership understands (too well) that they will get their cut whether the relationship works or not!