From The Weekly Standard, The Koch Brothers, Unions, and the Democratic Party’s Campaign Finance Delusions by Mark Hemingway.

Excerpt:

But how are lobbying efforts “preventing anti-union legislation” any different than Exxon lobbying to prevent “anti-energy exploration legislation” that would be harmful and disruptive to that company’s reason for being? Not that I’m defending the lobbying efforts of either Exxon or unions, but I fail to see how the disclosure standards for unions should be different than any other special interest.

Of course, the problem here is that Democrats fail to see unions as a special interest, but that’s exactly what they are. There are 14.3 million union members — about 11.3 percent of the workforce. And the majority of union members now belong to public sector unions. In living memory, radical conservatives such as FDR and the head of the AFL-CIO were opposed to public sector unions because they saw that collective bargaining with the taxpayer was an inherently corrupting process. So what’s good for unions has now become bad for the vast majority of the American people, who now have to foot the bill for the overly generous benefits enjoyed by public sector unions — benefits that were lobbied for using taxpayer-funded salaries. And private sector unions haven’t shown much less contempt for the taxpayer. Not that long ago, they were lobbying for $160 billion bailout of bankrupt union pension plans.

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