RALEIGH – It’s far from a majority, I grant you. But there are more than a few state legislators in North Carolina who think labor unions should gain the power to represent public employees in collective bargaining on issues of compensation and working conditions.

I’m not sure what fantasy world they inhabit, though I’m sure I wouldn’t want to join them in it.

Back here in the real world, one of the few competitive advantages North Carolina still enjoys is a low rate of unionization and little interference by public-sector unions in the delivery of state and local public services. To cede collective bargaining authority to the likes of the N.C. Association of Educators or the Services Employees International Union would be to guarantee higher costs, higher taxes, and lower quality.

None of which would be the interest of the vast majority of North Carolinians, regardless of whether or where they work.

Don Bellante, David Denholm, and Ivan Osorio just wrote an informative paper for the Cato Institute on public-sector unionism. They warn that in the states where unions are pervasive and engage in collective bargaining, the results are unambiguously disastrous. To North Carolina policymakers considering the idea here, the authors don’t beat around the bush:

As keepers of the public purse, legislators and local council members have an obligation to protect taxpayers’ interests. By granting monopoly power to labor unions over the supply of government labor, elected officials undermine their duty to taxpayers, because this puts unions in a privileged position to extract political goods in the form of high pay and benefits that are much higher than anything comparable in the private sector.

Having the government sanction and control collective bargaining in the private sector is bad enough. Ideally, labor law in a free society should recognize an individual’s right to join whatever association he wishes and for employers and employees to make whatever contractual arrangements they wish. That’s it. If you want to join a union to bargain on your behalf, you are free to do so. So are your coworkers. If enough current and prospective employees join a union, perhaps the employer will feel the need to bargain collectively rather than individually. Perhaps not. Government should stay entirely out of it.

That’s not the labor law we have, unfortunately. But even private-sector unionization isn’t as debilitating as public-sector unionization, because the unique circumstances of the latter. Private firms compete for labor, investment, and sales and must earn profits to stay in businesses. Governments are subject to far less competitive pressure and can raise funds through compulsion. Furthermore, public-sector unions often play a significant role in the electoral campaigns that bestow political power on those who must subsequently approve union contracts. The potential for self-dealing is significant.

North Carolina faces many difficult problems. We certainly don’t need to create another one by giving labor unions more power over the finance and delivery of government services.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation