Extortion

Thy name is public employee union.

Michael Barone has a splendid essay in the Washington Examiner about how taxpayers are being forced to support the Democratic Party through the latter’s incestuous relationship with government unions:

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that “to compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” Democrats and their union pals might want to mull that one over before the people begin taking to heart another of Jefferson’s beliefs: “A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high virtues of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation.” And this one: “I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”