Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
You report that, in response to Google’s firing of 28 workers who protested that company’s affiliation with the Israeli government, a spokeswoman for the group that organized the protests said about the firings that “this flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers – the ones who create real value for executives and shareholders” (“Google Fires 28 Employees for Protesting Company’s Cloud Deal With Israel,” April 18).
If this spokeswoman is correct, Google has done the fired workers a favor: Because the value of Google’s output is created by that company’s workers, the fired ones will have no trouble persuading their former colleagues to quit Google, join them in a workers’ cooperative, and produce all the value that they once produced for Google but with none of this value filched from them by Google’s leeching executives and shareholders.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
