Less scholarly but much more amusing than the paper by Richard Epstein I posted earlier is this column by Jonah Goldberg on the “Employee Free Choice Act.”

Goldberg likens Big Labor’s tactics to that of the British Navy’s press gangs of a couple centuries ago. They’d do just about anything to get the manpower the navy needed and the unions will do just about anything to dragoon more people into union ranks so they can collect dues from them.

Especially valuable in Goldberg’s column is his evisceration of the misleading idea being spread by union allies that the bill really doesn’t get rid of secret ballot elections. An election remains a theoretical possibility that would probably never happen because the process is under the control of the union.

Big Labor, one of the founding members of the Takings Coalition (Grover Norquist’s useful phrase) often resorts to politics in order to get what it can’t through voluntary action — members, money, contracts. The fact that Obama is eager to repay it for election support with a piece of crass special interest legislation that infringes upon freedom and erodes the rule of law tells us a lot about his morality.