My Favorite Excerpts of the Day.

Unions’ power to fix high prices for their members’ labor rests on legal privileges and immunities that they get from government, both by statute and by nonenforcement of other laws. The purpose of these legal privileges is to restrict others from working for lower wages.
— Morgan Reynolds, via King Banaian

Anyone who takes my lower wages away will have to pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

Then [1935] as now, there was an unresolved cultural question: Is electricity a public good that's supposed to raise the quality of everyone's lives, or is it a commodity to be distributed in a free-market environment only to those who can afford it?

Private-sector utilities found it unprofitable to extend lines into low-density rural areas, and municipal utilities were usually limited -- thanks to private sector lobbying -- to their incorporated limits. That was an answer of sorts to the cultural question. But in the depths of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration came down squarely on the side of electricity as a public good.

— "Government capitalism can be a very good thing," George Sibley