Yeah you would have to be at least a medical doctor or have an advanced PhD.

Lol, "you're competing to not compete." So you compete once, and operate competition-free for 5 years, rinse, repeat? No again from me, dawg. That's not competition.

What a useless post. Show me one person who knows everything and you'll have the first person ever born who can't be educated by damn near anybody. All a PhD. means is that you're highly knowledgeable about a specialized field, and Thor's specialty is obviously NOT politics, or the functioning of state vs private education systems, be they US or Worldwide. Useless twit probably doesn't even understand that the Ivy League are all Private Universities.

It's really no different from having a 5 year contract to supply labor or services.

You're the one making the claim. You source it. Your claims aren't trivial or universally accepted. I could very easily find garbage studies that say "private better" and rip them apart, but I'd rather examine the specific reasons why you're making these claims.

Just like how cable companies "compete." They don't, it's a farce, and everyone knows it.

As I said, if you do not understand how the state vs private education systems work, you need to research into it. Once you do so, you may be qualified to discuss public sector unions. Likewise, having a basic understanding of police unions, and how those unions have been used to shield inexcusable actions, and even firefighters unions, which are guilty of extreme abuse of volunteer firefighters. Until then, you are simply ignorant and spouting useless nonsense.

Notice I've said nothing about private sector unions other than that most are ineffectual. I'm not against them, there's no reason to abolish them. There's no captive audience, and in the end, there are already enough worker protection laws and regulations in place that they're mostly meaningless. But for all that, if the employees of a business decide to get together and attempt to negotiate better employment terms in a union-like fashion, that's their business. At the corporate level, it typically won't work. At a smaller business, and specialty business level, it can, as no business can function without employees.

I'm not well-versed on unions, but I believe one of the major issues with unions is that sometimes (such as the case with some teacher's unions) they do more than protect teachers against state power and actually end up competing against other workers/unions for limited state resources. During times of economic downturn previously negotiated terms of a union contract may become untenable, and some unions refuse to engage in a prudent form of compromise. They also sometimes negotiate for levels of benefits that they know the state can't afford in the long run, but because of the structure of unions, they'll get whatever they can that will make members happy and wins them support.

I support unions unequivocally, but that doesn't mean they're without pernicious aspects.

Are you saying private companies can make agreements to not compete with each other and keep prices high at the expense of the consumer?

That doesn't seem like something the free market would allow.

Funny how that came about due to government regulations, and not competition for the same customers...