In today's Rocky Mountain News media column, I praise the Denver Post's new website, PoliticsWest.com, which uses blog power to expand the paper's coverage of politics throughout the Rocky Mountains. My previous column dealt with a topic which I had first raised on the VC (and on which the comments provided good insight): the law and ethics of a talk radio host encouraging the videotaping of patrons of a swinger's club.
On my father's website, there's a new article which uses Labor Day to remember the Colorado state government's massacre of the striking coal miners at Ludlow, Colorado. In another column, he details the battle between then-Republican Governor Bill Owens and former Republican Secretary of State Natalie Meyer over casino regulation. Owens won in the short term, but Democratic Governor Bill Ritter is now carrying out Meyer's program for more regulatory employees.
New Kopel stuff:
For one thing, it appears that after the strike began, the strikers were fired. Therefore, they were no longer on strike. The "strikebreakers" appear therefore to be people hired instead of them. The ex-workers decided to not allow this, and illegally occupied land. Why didn't the government at this point merely arrest them? Is it because it preferred to kill them instead? It's possible. But it seems to me more likely that the government felt it would be dangerous to merely arrest them, because the ex-workers were committing and threatening violence in a manner that is very common and that is very commonly left out of "histories".
Certainly Kopel's article does noting to clarify all this. Now it's likely the company did something immoral or illegal in firing the workers, and it's certain the government should have preserved law and order in a much less deadly way. But the idea that unions, or would-be unions, should be the law unto themselves is something that I do not accept.
I don't think the second follows from the first.
So it was safer to just shoot them. Got it.