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Some things in life just elude me. I think and I think and I think, and I still just don't get them. Today's mindbender, fueled by recent talk of education, airline strikes and the NBA lockout, is the concept of "professional unions".

No matter how hard I try, I just don't get it. The only way that unions make any sense as a believable public entity is if their primary role is to protect the rights and interests of easily exploitable working class stiffs. When one thinks of unions as they ought to be one thinks of laborers, steelworkers, coal miners and truck drivers. Hard working folks doing tough jobs for little pay. More importantly, people whose job skills are not sufficiently specialized to make them inherently marketable. If anyone can be a laborer, then the only way to keep laborer's wages up is through controlling the supply of laborers - through union shops, collective bargaining and strikes.

The government bought into this concept to the degree of defining two separate categories of employees, those who are "exempt" from the protective rules of the government's labor laws (mainly managers and professionals who are salaried) and those who are "non-exempt" (primarily those paid by hourly wage). The implication of this is pretty strong: employees who possess the sorts of skills greatly in demand do not need the protection of the government. Or, by inference, of unions. So why do we have a Professional Basketball Players' Union? Why do we have an Airline Pilots' Union? Why do we have Teachers' Unions?

So why "organize"? Thinking it through, there are only two reasons. In an "inelastic" labor market, one in which the demand for talent is more or less fixed, organized employees can drive the price of talent up. The employers simply have no reasonable alternative. In an elastic market it serves to make the market artificially less elastic by keeping out other equally mediocre employees, forcing the employer to behave in unnatural ways. What is interesting is that basketball players and airline pilots clearly fall within the first category, while teachers fall in the second. As the disastrous baseball strike of a few years back showed, there is simply no reasonable alternative to employing professional athletes. And I, for one, would not want to fly on an airline piloted by "minor leaguers".

Who would be hurt if these sorts of unions did not exist? Who is being protected who otherwise would suffer? Unless one defines suffering as making less than $150,000 a year, I can't see anyone who would suffer. Unions of true professionals are nothing more than leverage for forcing a bigger share of the trough. In an age obsessed with greed, how is it the media never pontificate about the greed of superstars and pilots and teachers? When pilots can strike and bring air commerce virtually to a halt, not so that they may buy their starving families a crust of bread, but so that they can buy that crucial second Benz, we have come a long and confusing way from the concept of unions as steadfast defender of the working man.