Too much or not enough?

Matt Yglesias has been writing a lot about unions lately, all of it positive. Today he says:

It seems that Senator Blance Lincoln (D-AR) thinks the Employee Free Choice Act is unnecessary. After all, non-union Arkansas is a bastion of prosperity! Well, actually, no, it’s poverty-stricken and features ultra low wages...Personally, I was raised in a family that believed that in a just society people who work hard at full-time jobs wouldn’t live in poverty and wouldn’t need to rely on charitable handouts to feed their families. That means high wages and unions.

Does it? California is also not very unionized, but most of the people there don't seem to be living in poverty.

One would think that the collapse of the Big 3 would at least give liberal bloggers like Yglesias and Ezra Klein pause about the idea that unions are Teh Awesome. But it hasn't. Instead, they've become far more vociferously pro-union than before, with very little substantive argument to back it up. To me, that's like the neocons claiming that we failed in Iraq because we didn't invade Iran. Instead of too much, they claim it just wasn't enough.

Which is not to say I am anti-union. I think unions can do a lot to help workers if used right, and a lot to harm workers if used wrong. The economics of unions are tricky and not well-understood. Whether unions are good or bad probably depends on the industry, the legal framework in place, the culture of labor-management relations, and the nature of global competition.

But Yglesias, Klein, and others don't see that. They think "unions --> higher wages --> good for working people," and the analysis pretty much stops there. That attitude will come back to bite liberals, because I guarantee that the bulk of America does not look at the collapse of the Big 3 and conclude that we need to re-unionize our economy. If unions are going to come back, it's going to take an honest re-appraisal of why they work in some situations and don't work in others, and how our laws and culture can be tweaked to make them work more often. If liberals don't make that re-appraisal, who will?