Most organizations are there to benefit the organization or leader not the members or public.

Here’s the thing: both of those are good. Anywhere you have a large group of people doing a job, you will inevitably have issues where their bosses want to make decisions which will negatively impact life for a lot of working people, and collective bargaining helps counterbalance that.

There are problems with certain unions, but that has to do with the framework around them. When a police union protests because one of their members is found guilty, that looks like a union problem but it’s really a symptom of a deeper leadership problem: you’re hiring a ton of cops who think they’re above the law!

That’s not a contradiction. I’m in the “union bad” camp, though I’m also certain there are examples of good unions. I wouldn’t deny that there are.

But I wouldn’t consider a good union as a counter example to my “unions bad” conclusion, and I do t believe this to be motivated reasoning.

For you see, by “unions bad” I mean that incentive misalignment makes all unions become self-serving and focus on protectionist policies that are ultimately in the long term a disservice to the workers they represent and the economy as a whole. TL;DR: unions come with bad incentives, and bad incentives eventually result in worse outcomes. Ergo, “unions bad.”