Labour unions need to rework themselves, I'm afraid,

Why? And How?

You haven't made any coherent case for what's wrong with the way labour unions work. All you've done is assert that they are excessively ideological and that they shouldn't interfere with the political process (which political process? as defined by who?).

Every time you've come up with a concrete example, there has been a perfectly valid pragmatic justification.

• You say that unions shouldn't care about work conditions in China, because that's none of their business. In a world with capital controls, that's a debatable point (I happen to disagree, but it's a debatable point). In a world without capital controls, it's pure, mean-spirited nonsense.

• You say that unions shouldn't care about outsourcing and maintaining a civil service. Yet empirically - pragmatically, if you will - outsourcing and hollowing out the civil service almost universally leads to worse working conditions and a downward wage pressure. (It also often leads to more expensive and lower quality service, but that's an aside.)

• You say that unions shouldn't care about immigration policy and discrimination, yet immigration policy directly affects the supply of labour (and the ease with which such labour can organise), and discriminatory policies tend to create a poorly organised underclass. Both will put downward pressure on wages.

• You say that unions shouldn't care about environmental policy. Yet employees are usually hit harder by environmental degradation than employers, on account of them being poorer.

The history of unions in the US shows how complex this topic is.

The history of unions in the US shows that systematic union-busting works exceedingly well.

The US unions were systematically persecuted at the federal, state and local level. Through legislation, through a concerted propaganda effort, through workplace-level union-busting, by deliberately race- and religion-baiting at every political level. That was a case of deliberate, ideological activism by right-wing extremists.

If you have a suggestion for how US labour unions could have resisted that, I'm all ears. So far, though, your only input into that discussion has been a refrain of "reform, reform, reform." But there's a conflict of interests here that cannot be resolved by pragmatic compromise, because the right-wing extremists perpetrating the union-busting would settle for nothing less than the total obliteration of organised labour. You cannot negotiate or compromise with people who want to drown government in a bathtub; you have to purge them from the body politic.

Is there an assault on benefits?

In 1980, tertiary education was free France, the UK, all of Scandinavia and all of Germany. In 2000, the UK and more than half of all German länder charge "tuition fees." To take just one very concrete example.

The list goes on with privatisation of health care, price hikes for railroad tickets, cutbacks in unemployment subsidies, outright theft of workers' pensions, below-inflation indexing of public pension schemes, below-inflation indexing of unemployment subsidies, tighter applicability requirements for unemployment subsidies, cutbacks in prescription drug subsidies, cutbacks in essential public services (railroads, schools, water, sewage, electricity).

I have a diary in the pipelines detailing another assault on Danish unemployment subsidies, and I'll leave the rest of the list as an exercise to the reader. Simply browsing ET should more than suffice for examples from France and the UK.

Sarkozy is for instance actively supporting regulatory protections against social dumping btw

Sarko makes noises about signing sternly worded letters. But until and unless I see the actual policy, I remain skeptical. As long as Sarko is palling around with pathological liars like Gordon Brown and Anders Fogh, he has the burden of proof to show that he's acting in good faith. You yourself conceded that politics needs to be argued at the policy level, not at the slogan level.

As for your examples of neocons/neolibs arguing from ideology, there's the small matter of fact that the neolibs and neocons were flat out wrong on the facts. And we knew pretty much precisely how and where they were wrong in considerable detail and well ahead of time. No, let's not mince words here: They were so full of shit that their ears started smelling. You have yet to make a remotely convincing case that this true for those that you accuse of being "left-wing ideologues" (and as an aside, you have yet to actually identify any, aside from labour unions - who these days are more centrist than the centre).

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.