Under the "situation containing contradictory features" the second paragraph takes care of that.
Under the "absurd statement turns out to be true upon research" consider how weirdly we distribute risk. So hire an unlicensed plumber he causes a leak that destroys the house, foreclose, bankruptcy, and all the risk lands on the govt guaranteed mortgage loan provider aka the taxpayer. So I can save $50 today with 99.9% odds and if something bad happens, all the risk falls on other people not solely on me. You'd be a fool to ever hire a union plumber, and the government would be a fool not to prosecute unlicensed plumbers because they pay every failed mortgage.
Risk estimation is very interesting because much like accumulation of capital, it seems only a tiny minority of the population are any good at it.
There's also the fake free market situation. If you can't have a meeting of the minds between you and your doctor or plumber, you can't have a free market transaction. Rather than sending the whole population thru med school and plumber school, it seems cheaper as an overall total societal cost to certify practitioners in both fields. That's the paradox of a regulated uneducated market being closer to a free market WRT identical decisions and outcomes than an unregulated uneducated market, how could adding regulation make something freer, well, clearly it doesn't, but it makes the outcome indistinguishable from an actual free market.
I realize you're not the one who used the phrase, but I don't see why a customer of a doctor or plumber would need to be a doctor or plumber themselves in order to have a meeting of the minds in this sense. Nor do I see how having the government certify the doctor or plumber helps with this issue.
If everyone made more money, everyone would be better off, right? Except in order for this to happen, everyone would need to charge more for their goods and services, so prices would rise and the raises everyone got would be sucked up by rising prices, leaving everyone in the same place as where they started, relatively.
The sad truth is that every economy must pick winners and losers. If everyone wins, no one wins.
Whether this selection process aligns with productivity determines the trajectory of nations. Productivity measures actual wealth creation, and hopefully politics does not lag too far behind it.
Countries with high unionization and relatively low income differences between low end and high end workers are excellent performers. Especially if you include quality of life, free time, egalitarianism, low poverty etc instead of just average GDP per capita.
That's a correlation, but the causal relationship is the other way around. Unions form after a country industrializes as a response to income and wealth inequality. So you're comparing the income and wealth of already industrialized countries which subsequently developed trade unions with presumably countries that haven't industrialized yet.
Indeed in the Scandinavian countries you're citing, excessive trade unionism, among other illiberal measures, in the 80s and early 90s led to economic crisis. There were economic reforms in the mid 90s which restored economic growth by paring back the role of the state and trade unions.
Having your basic needs met is not a zero sum game, but beyond that the economy is mostly about status. Whether you are working to attract a mate, impress your family, or build your nation, you are seeking status relative to your peers, and that's zero sum.
I'm not convinced. First, there are plenty of things that people are interested in that do not improve their social status neither satisfy their basics needs. Like movies. Secondly, social status is fractal in nature, each subculture considers different things valuable and you can belong to many subcultures at the same time, so it isn't necessarily a zero sum game. You can be a lowly janitor at day, but the lead player of the company of the football team at night.
Movies and other such pleasures are so cheap compared to the big line items in life. I don't think anyone studies to get into college and work a job for 40 years for the sake of watching movies. People do these arduous things mostly, I believe, for the sake of status. If you did not care about status, as many don't, you could rent a small one bedroom apartment in an inexpensive place and work an easy job to make ends meet, and still watch movies or play video games, what have you.
Social status can be fractured, but eventually people come into conflict for people, places, and things. We don't live in independent streams. We fight over the best apartments, the best cars, the best mates, the best stocks, etc. Then status, money, and power come into play.
