Who would you support in the Battle of Blair Mountain?

[lfromnj]

?

[dead0man]

of those two, the miners, easy.

[sting in the rafters]

The miners (sane, non-bootlicker)

[Orwell]

When Dead0Man is on the Miners side it's clear the Mine Owners suck

[lfromnj]

When Dead0Man is on the Miners side it's clear the Mine Owners suck

Yes but the right of private property > sh**tty morals to me.
The owners should and did have the right to evict people for joining a union. If they didn't want to be evicted they shouldn't have joined the union.

[Skill and Chance]

When Dead0Man is on the Miners side it's clear the Mine Owners suck

Yes but the right of private property > sh**tty morals to me.
The owners should and did have the right to evict people for joining a union. If they didn't want to be evicted they shouldn't have joined the union.

Private property rights are important, but housing is different from other business relationships as there is a clear power dynamic.  Much of pre-WWII landlord-tenant law was a relic of medieval feudalism that was not compatible with a free society.    The abuses in the sharecropping South were even worse than this incident. 

[H. Ross Peron]

When Dead0Man is on the Miners side it's clear the Mine Owners suck

Yes but the right of private property > sh**tty morals to me.
The owners should and did have the right to evict people for joining a union. If they didn't want to be evicted they shouldn't have joined the union.

Ok cuckold.

[lfromnj]

When Dead0Man is on the Miners side it's clear the Mine Owners suck

Yes but the right of private property > sh**tty morals to me.
The owners should and did have the right to evict people for joining a union. If they didn't want to be evicted they shouldn't have joined the union.

Ok cuckold.

Ok you can call me a bootlicker but not that please

[dead0man]

When Dead0Man is on the Miners side it's clear the Mine Owners suck

Yes but the right of private property > sh**tty morals to me.
The owners should and did have the right to evict people for joining a union. If they didn't want to be evicted they shouldn't have joined the union.

yes, of course, but the mine owners made choices that lead to the unionization.  If the "owners" (in general, not just of coal mines) had treated the workers better in the 19th century and early 20th century, horrible ideologies would have never happened or at least never caught on.  The Free Market doesn't have to (and shouldn't) lead to things like company towns where the company owns everything from the floors in the houses to the local congressman.  Where the employers don't get paid in real American currency, but paper that only works in the Company Store, with jacked prices.  The owners were so quick to use heavy violence if anyone tried to get in the way.  Of course the unions could be every bit as horrible and violent, but usually only after being pushed to it by the owners.

I am 100% for strong private property rights, but it must be under a system as fair for everyone as we can make it.  It will probably never be perfectly fair, but it's certainly light years better than it was at the time of The Battle of Blair Mountain.

[Vice President Christian Man]

The miners without a second thought

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm glad to see this is such a no-brainer. As dead0man laid out very well, even from a principled laissez-faire perspective these mine owners were committing unacceptable abuses of their power. Indeed, an argument can be made that so great was their power over their employees' lives that their behavior was effectively state violence from a Weberian monopoly-on-force perspective.

[If my soul was made of stone]

I'd meant to make an "Opinion of Bill Blizzard" thread for the centennial of this momentous occasion about a month ago, but I tragically forgot. All of the folk who organized and carried out that insurrection are personal heroes of mine.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

In most cases you can say history is sufficiently complex that there was no "right" or "wrong" side, only different perspectives. This is not one of those times.