No Liberal is Pro-Choice

We have evolved to need coercion.   Harvard professor Daniel E. Lieberman

The partisan fight over Governor Scott Walker’s “Act 10” law in Wisconsin is just the latest illustration of the importance of coercion to the political agenda of the left. Prior to the enactment of Act 10, public employees in Wisconsin had union dues automatically deducted from their paychecks. They had no choice in the matter, and that’s the way liberals liked it.

Walker’s new law gave the each government employee the right to chose whether his money goes to the union, and earned Walker the undying enmity of the union leaders, Democrats around the nation, and the left in general. The outrage that Walker’s law engendered demonstrates pretty clearly that conservatives, rather than liberals, should be the ones generally be identified as “pro-choice.”

Once Walker’s law had been put into effect, the reason for the unions’ opposition became clear. Given the right to choose, workers abandoned their unions in droves. Membership in AFSCME dropped by 55%.

The reason pro-abortion liberals universally use the words “pro-choice” to describe their position is obvious enough. “Pro-abortion” sounds awful. But no one who supports a left wing political agenda has any right to call himself “pro-choice,” if words are to have any meaning.

Even on abortion, leftists overwhelmingly support the idea that taxpayers at every level should be forced to pay for other people’s abortions, hardly a pro-choice position if you take the words literally.

Liberals are always and forever trying to limit people’s choices in one way or another. Just a few days before the Wisconsin recall election, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the city is going to ban extra-large soft drinks. Liberals applauded. A Harvard professor named Daniel E. Lieberman quickly penned an editorial saying that the kind of government control of personal behavior that Mayor Bloomberg is pushing will be the salvation of the human race.

Whether the issue is union membership, soft drinks, school choice, health care, social security privatization, gas milage, or schoolchildren’s lunches; left wingers are always pro-coercion and anti-choice.

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