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The standard cliche for Labor Day is that it’s the day to celebrate the triumph of workers over exploitive capitalist employers. This got me thinking about a better cliche–The Cliches of Socialism, by Hans F. Sennholz. For today, I recommend Number 11, which ends on this little gem:

“The rise of unionism during the past century is a result of the fallacious labor theory of value, which held that all profit and rent and interest had to come out of the “surplus value” unfairly withheld from the workers. Labor unions are the bitter fruit of this erroneous theory, with a record of exploitation of workers far more grievous than the alleged evils the unions were supposed to rectify”.