We haven't talked much about public sector unions. Labor has better numbers there, obviously. But as we all saw in Wisconsin, these unions are also vulnerable. I think a lot of people associate them with the aspects of government they don't like—bureaucracies, too much government spending, and so on. Pretend I'm your typical, non-unionized voter. Convince me, in a paragraph, that these unions do more good than harm.

Public sector unions are a hard sell to the vast majority of private sector employees who are themselves non-union. But public sector unions didn't emerge in a vacuum. They happened for the same reasons that private sector unions do: workers band together when their employers mistreat them in the zillion ways that lousy bosses can mistreat their workers. It's hard to develop an ethos of professional service without the imperative of collective advancement and respect. Dana Goldstein does a great job of tracing the development of that ethos in her new history of the teaching profession, The Teacher Wars. I would rather that workers in the public sector, i.e, that are paid by my taxes, are fairly treated and compensated. I think that is more likely to lay the foundation for good public services than to expect those services to be delivered by a disgruntled workforce. So yeah, we can all talk about "reforms"—if actually undertaken in good faith—and remind ourselves that the provision of services to the citizen consumer is the highest goal of the public sector. But those Finnish teachers we keep hearing so much about are unionized, too, so I don't think there is anything intrinsically inefficient about public sector unions.

Conservatives make all kinds of criticisms of unions—they’re inflexible, they tend to be corrupt. Pick one of their complaints that you find the most reasonable and tell me how you’d address it.

There are several reasonable critiques of unions. I’m not sure they’re really intrinsic to unionism—in other words, unions could accommodate these critiques and still do what they do. Also, it must be said, the most cogent critiques of unions don’t come always come from conservatives. Sometimes they come from the left, which argues, for example, that most unions are structured to limit rank and file democracy.