My intellectual lefty friends love to bemoan the loss of high-paying blue collar jobs. I’m not so sentimental about those losses. Given unions’ attitudes about everything but their own immediate pay (i.e., their anti-environmental record, failure to protect workers at the bottom of the income ladder, resistance to innovation, etc.), I’ve always questioned the relevance of rote labor as an end in itself. This article in today’s Detroit Free Press exposes a dirty little secret about how big unions and big industry colluded to keep their workforce as dumb as they could be.

Now we know why Michigan has been in a multi-decade depression.