Labor Laws: Uber’s Road to Serfdom, or Think Tanks to the Rescue?

This Forbes column by John Goodman of the Goodman Institute looks at the ongoing disputes over ride-sharing services like Uber, and at the differences between labor law (actually legislation), and the common law. From “It’s Time To Rethink Our Labor Laws“:

Should federal courts protect everyday people who choose to work for Uber or Lyft, or who decide to rent space via AirBnB? Should people be free to safely deploy their time, cars, and homes in ways that serve others and earn revenue? Or are these contractual agreements open to state and local regulators on grounds other than protecting public safety? (Public safety can be better protected through certification and insurance, but that’s another story.)

John Goodman’s article connects to a question asked the first day at last week’s Calvin Coolidge Foundation debate camp about F. A. Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom. The notes and links below discuss of this connection, which should be helpful for NCFCA policy and LD topics on federal courts and privacy.

The Road to Serfdom (pdf) is online on the IEA website. Most of Hayek’s books are scholarly inquiries on law and economics, but this one was written for general audiences. It is often the only book academics are familiar with, so when they criticize Hayek’s writing as simplistic or fear-mongering, this is the book they are referring to. It was written right after WWII and claimed a natural progression from national planning and regulation to fascist policies.

A condensed version of The Road to Serfdom (pdf)  appeared in the April, 1945 issue of The Reader’s Digest and was read by millions across the U.S.

An illustrated version of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was published in Look magazine in 1945.

Hayek and his ideas played a key role in economic reforms in the UK and US in the 1980s. Hayek advised WWII war pilot and war hero Antony Fisher, a successful entrepreneur in the chicken industry, to instead of going into politics start a think tank to influence the “climate of ideas” in the UK.

The IEA, Institute for Economic Affairs held conferences for scholars and journalists, and published books and pamphlets on the errors of planning and socialism. Margaret Thatcher was reading IEA publications through her early career in politics, and passed many of the IEA’s proposed economic reforms as as Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.

The “battle of ideas” between markets vs. economic planning is told in the PBS documentary The Commanding Heights. Episode one is on YouTube here.

Antony Fisher also helped found many of the leading market-based think tanks in the U.S., including the Manhattan Institute in NYC, NCPA in Dallas, Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, and Fraser Institute in Vancouver BC.  John Goodman was the founder and long-time president of NCPA, and last year left NCPA to launch the Goodman Institute.

David Theroux founded and was President of the Pacific Research Institute, and later left to start the Independent Institute in Oakland.

The Atlas Economic Freedom Foundation (Atlas Network), also started by Antony Fisher, continues this mission, supporting think tanks and educational foundations around the world. Video about Atlas Network here.

Back to F. A. Hayek… He later wrote The Constitution of Liberty  and years later, a trilogy: Law, Legislation and Liberty, which is reviewed here (pdf).

Law, Legislation and Liberty gives the deeper story behind John Goodman’s observation that U.S. labor law (a many-layered web of labor legislation and regulation accumulated over decades), restricts worker options as it raises costs and complexity for employers.

Goodman discusses the common law foundations of labor relations, law that was never passed by a legislature but instead was made or “discovered” over time by judges as they adjudicated labor disputes brought before them.

For LD debaters, privacy protections are based on common law in the long-standing protections of private property (“a man’s home is his castle”), and the ban on “general warrants” that long allowed the British and Colonial governments to search homes and papers for anything that might be illegal. So the Fourth Amendment requires specific warrants.

For the Federal Court topic, the early role of the Supreme Court was to guide the federal government in its exercise of its limited powers and to adjudicate disputes between states. Federal powers didn’t including regulating labor relationships.

From 1897-1937, the “Lochner-era” Supreme Court invalidated much Progressive Era social legislation passed to regulate industry and uplift the poor. Supreme Court majorities based their decisions on protecting substantive due process and “the liberty of contract.” After Franklin Roosevelt’s appointments became the Supreme Court majority, the Court deferred to legislatures on cases involving economic liberties, but continued enforcing protections for civil liberties.

At the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation debate camp, my presentations discussed new books on this ongoing debate between judicial activism (social democrats “legislating from the bench”), judicial restraint (conservatives opposed to judicial activism), and judicial engagement (the argument for principled judicial action, as during the Lochner era).

Past posts on this blog discuss these legal and economic arguments, and debates over whether a “liberty of contract” should again be protected by the Federal Courts.

And, finally, Hayek’s most famous economics article, on which FEE founder Leonard Read’s essay I, Pencil was based:  “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (pdf).

So… many books and articles to read, plus hours of The Commanding Heights to watch. I hope all this is interesting and helpful for debate students interested in understanding “the deep magic” of market economies and legal systems.