The market for the company's projects was shrinking, it is true.
When this happens, the normal reaction for a business is to reduce costs and find out ways to improve its sales by investing in other business lines.
However, the unions prevented the company from having the flexibility to cut costs and finance growth.
I think the issue is, the locations where the bakeries were enabled them to deliver fresher products to these markets ... don’t know if this was critical in their business model.
I buy chips made in North Carolina all the time in Washington.
So..
There can be a rational argument that the free market killed this company (we will never be able to prove or disprove this) but there is an absolute proven fact that the union kept them from having the flexibility for the Hostess company to have an opportunity to reinvent themselves to save these jobs.
The analysis was not only off-base, but irrelevant.
He seems to want go all the way toward building a case
that the “free market” should be allowed to work through its ineluctable process of separating the wheat from the chaff, and he makes some high-falutin’ references to creative destruction and Joseph Schumpeter, but he misses the entirely obvious point that its that intransigent union that effectively TOOK THE PLACE OF THE MARKET in the case of Hostess.The union practiced its own not-very-creative destruction in this case, and I wish I could figure out how it’s serving a Higher Agenda here, like one, for example, that’s satisfying the higher authority of the Obama Administration.This is a writer with no sense of irony, which is something we were all supposed to learn about in High School.