JD Vance vs. Reality

The vice president says unions can stop socialism and communism—when unionists, socialists and communists are together attacking entrepreneurs.

Vice President JD Vance was on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week, giving a nearly three-hour interview to promote his new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. About 20 minutes before the end of the episode, they get into a conversation about why younger Americans are gravitating toward socialism and the type of conditions that lead to communism, mixed in with a conversation about AI and job-market fears.

That part of the interview scared the heck out of me. The sitting vice president of the United States describes expanded unionism as the way to defeat communism, all while name-checking his friend Oren Cass, who refuses to acknowledge the existence of successful independent contractors at all.

The following clip is cued to begin at this part of the podcast, if you want to hear it in the vice president’s own words:

The problem the vice president describes is real. He’s talking about people, especially younger Americans, feeling like victims of a rigged system where they cannot possibly succeed. Socialism appeals to them more than capitalism. There’s more than a little research out there about this rising red tide.

But the solution our vice president suggests is to “give normal people some power in this system”—in the form of expanded unions.

Giving “normal people” more power makes sense to me.

But doing it by expanding unions, at this moment in time, does not.

Unions today aren’t what they were decades ago. Nowadays, they are politically powerful entities that keep trying to take power away from us “normal people,” so much so that even when 99% of us raise our voices in opposition to a Big Labor power grab over our lives, the unionists call us dangerous and insist that our government must ignore us all.

Where ‘Normal People’ Stand

Let’s start by establishing where most “normal people” in the United States stand on whether joining a union is the best way to try and achieve the American Dream.

For starters, most non-union employees don’t have any interest in joining a union whatsoever:

Beyond that, a majority of Americans say that all things being equal, they don’t want to be employees of any kind, union or non-union. Most of us say we’d prefer to be our own bosses:

And among people who have had the courage and grit to make that leap and become self-employed, a huge majority of 80% tell the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that we prefer to remain independent contractors:

When Vice President Vance talks about the need to “give normal people some power in this system” by adding more unionized employees, he’s ignoring the fact that millions upon millions of us see a real path to financial and personal power in not being employees at all.

And what’s really mind-bending is that he’s one of us. The vice president is saying these things while he’s out on the media circuit promoting sales of his new book. His financial disclosures show that his publishing deals are a traditional advance-plus-royalties business relationship for his previous book, Hillbilly Elegy, and for this new book too.

That means he’s not a unionized employee of HarperCollins. He’s very likely earning that money the way most authors do: as an independent contractor. The unions he wants to expand are the same ones pushing freelance-busting laws that the Authors Guild says threaten the very kind of business relationship he has with his own publishing house.

It’s these unions that keep pushing government to restrict our ability to be self-employed across all kinds of professions, to the point that here in my home state of New Jersey, they just proposed nearly eviscerating everyone’s ability to be self-employed at all. It’s these unions pushing policies that have become an existential threat to Americans who wish to be our own bosses, something that we all have been free to do since the day this nation was founded. It’s these unions that are dismissing the clearly stated desire of most independent contractors—including millions of us earning at least $100,000 a year—who wish to continue exercising our power to work on our own terms.

I believe in Vice President Vance’s freedom to have that independent-contractor business relationship and income. I believe in everyone’s freedom to work in whatever way works best for us.

It’s incredibly disconcerting to see the vice president of the United States not only standing on the side of the unionists who keep trying to shut down this pathway to the American Dream, but also suggesting that we need to empower and embolden these extremists even further.

The Union Power Imbalance

Vice President Vance talks in that clip about the robber barons of the 19th century, the industrialists and capitalists who amassed unprecedented wealth that they transformed into power over our government. It didn’t matter what the “normal people” wanted or thought was right; the robber barons could bend our government to their will, no matter how much it angered or hurt everyone else.

He describes this imbalance in the context of today’s increasingly powerful tech companies. Which may, in some ways, be a fair comparison—but it’s not the only comparison we need to be talking about these days if we want to have an honest conversation about the ability to exert far too much power over our government.

If the goal is to “give normal people some power in this system” where we are up against mightily funded, politically powerful forces that go against the will of most “normal people,” then one of the things we need to weaken, dramatically, is the power that some of today’s union leaders have amassed.

Unions today are not the same as unions even a few decades ago, when their overriding purpose was to negotiate things like better pay and working conditions for their members. Nowadays, some unions are throwing around unfathomable sums of money and exercising enormous power over our politicians in attempts to control all kinds of people who aren’t union members at all.

During the 2023–24 election cycle, the four biggest public sector unions—the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Service Employees International Union, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—reportedly spent more than a combined $915 million in partisan elections. There’s another report that says teachers unions alone have funneled more than $1 billion into political causes during the past decade.

Today’s unions have evolved into a system that, as wealth manager Jay Rogers wrote recently in The Hill, is actually a machine that converts mandatory dues into unaccountable political power.

Unaccountable political power is the same kind of power the robber barons had. It’s the kind of power Vice President Vance is suggesting “normal people” need more leverage to stop.

Empowering today’s unions is the opposite of giving normal people that leverage. It’s strengthening what is already cronyism and corruption run amok.

The 1% in Control

We’re seeing this modern reality of extremist unionism play out right now in my home state of New Jersey, where we just went through a public-comment process about an independent-contractor rule that the AFL-CIO and other unionists strongly urged the state to put through.

The public hearing was standing room only, and testimony was 3-to-1 in opposition.

The written public comments were 99% opposed, with just 26 favorable comments out of about 9,500 filed overall.

Almost nobody other than unions and union-adjacent groups, like multimillion-dollar think tanks, said this rulemaking was a good idea. The public-comment process revealed that this rule was something Big Labor wanted against the will of virtually everyone else in the state.

And yet, the acting state labor commissioner—a former AFL-CIO employee named Kevin Jarvis—went ahead and finalized the anti-independent-contractor rule anyway. Our state government simply ignored the clear wishes of all the “normal people” and did what the 1% wanted.

We’re now in a window of a few months before this rule takes effect, when our Legislature could step in and block it. Which is why the AFL-CIO organized all kinds of unionists to testify yet again against independent contractors at the State House, with the head of the New Jersey AFL-CIO and the acting labor commissioner mingling in the standing-room-only crowd, looking like a couple of untouchables.

Charles Wowkanech of the New Jersey AFL-CIO (left) and New Jersey acting Labor Commissioner Kevin Jarvis

Acting Labor Commissioner Jarvis also gave a media interview in which he tried to justify ignoring the will of the people. His thinking, as he described it, was that if a union boss files a public comment, then that public comment should count as many as a million times, because unions can have a million members. By contrast, when an independent contractor or a company that works with hundreds or thousands of independent contractors files a public comment, it should only be counted once.

Put another way, Jarvis suggested that it was somehow mathematically democratic for the government to bend to the will of the 1%, against the 99% of the public who stood together opposed.

This is not government of, by and for the people. This is government of, by and for the labor unions. It is union power run amok with zero accountability to the people.

And these are the kinds of unionists whose power Vice President Vance says he wants to expand.

The vice president is plainly wrong. Expanding the kind of control these unionists already have is not a way to “give normal people some power in this system.”

It’s a way to help these kinds of relentless, remorseless, anti-entrepreneurial extremists crush tens of millions of people’s chosen pathway to achieve the American Dream.

And About Defeating Communism…

What’s perhaps most perplexing about Vice President Vance’s thinking is that he says he believes stronger unions are a way to defeat socialism and communism.

Is he simply unaware that all of us have been forced to fight the combined forces of unionists, socialists and communists for years now, just to try and keep our freedom to be our own bosses?

These unionists have been working hand in hand with the Democratic Socialists of America to try and tear down entrepreneurism. These unionists have been pushing federal legislation that the Communist Party USA favors to wipe self-employed people out of our capitalist system. These unionists have been trying to remake our laws in ways that the former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board wrote would “substantially unravel and change large segments of the US economy.”

Forget about today’s unions being a way to “give normal people some power in this system.” These extremists want to blow the entire American system apart.

And they’re trying all kinds of ways to do it. In Massachusetts, for instance, instead of trying to change the definition of a legal independent contractor the way we’re seeing in states like California and New Jersey, there’s an experiment going on with allowing a version of organization called sectoral bargaining—which gives union bosses a new kind of power in the United States, power that extends over employees and independent contractors alike, without many of those people ever getting to vote on unionization at all.

Again, talk about taking away the power of “normal people.” And frighteningly, sectoral bargaining is likely what Vice President Vance meant when he talked on Joe Rogan’s podcast about unions needing to evolve into 21st-century institutions with the ability to negotiate differently. He’s said for a while now that he thinks sectoral bargaining could be a good idea.

It is, in fact, a horrible idea. Giving a union boss control over my work life when I don’t even get a vote about representation has precisely nothing to do with empowering me. Restricting the freedom to be our own bosses is about the least-American thing imaginable, being pushed by some of the most fringe thinkers in our society.

And I do mean looney-tunes, fruit-loop fringe. In the public comments that the State of New Jersey received, the freelance busters cited source material that equates independent contracting with the crimes of human trafficking, child labor and workplace violence. We have also recently seen unionists like Teamsters boss Sean O’Brien sitting on stage and saying that independent contracting is a danger to the nation’s future—the same way racists used to talk about equality for Black people and sexists used to talk about equality for women.

These are today’s unionists. Standing in opposition to where the vast majority of “normal people” in America stand on a fundamental issue of freedom.

We’re in a clear battle of what I recently defined in a report titled “Extremism vs. Entrepreneurism,” and Vice President Vance just said he wants to further empower the extremists. Hence my reaction to hearing that part of Joe Rogan’s interview with him, and feeling scared to death as an independent contractor. I might as well have been back testifying in front of the U.S. Senate HELP Committee, sitting across from Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders as he mischaracterized statistics and data to suggest that making my business relationships illegal would be good for me.

I was raised in a union household back in the 1970s and ‘80s. For some people, including my parents, being unionized employees gave them a kind of income and benefits they couldn’t figure out how to achieve otherwise.

But I am not of my parents’ generation, and today’s unions are not the same. It’s a half century later, and unions are using their power to launch relentless, remorseless attacks against us smallest of small-business owners.

Akash Chougule, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, got it right yesterday when he wrote the following, in a piece titled “Vice President Vance Agrees with the DSA, and They’re Both Wrong”:

“The American Dream is not only about GDP, prices, or stock indexes. It is about whether people can build a life worth living — one that includes work, family, community, purpose, and a fair shot at upward mobility. Free markets are not the enemy of that dream. They are one of its indispensable foundations.”

I’m one of the “normal people.” I’ve achieved a life worth living as an independent contractor. And I wholeheartedly agree.