Internet Scofflaw

Okay, so get this:

A Michigan branch of the powerful Service Employees International Union saw its membership and revenues plummet after the reversal of a measure that forced caregivers tending to friends or relatives to be members with their dues paid by those they cared for.

More than 44,000 home-based healthcare workers parted ways with SEIU Healthcare Michigan after learning they did not have to join the union or pay dues, according to reports the union filed with the U.S. Department of Labor. Thousands of the employees were allegedly forced into the union under a plan the SEIU successfully lobbied for that classified even unpaid family members caring for their elderly parents as “home health care workers.” Dues were then automatically collected from the care recipients’ Medicare or Medicaid checks.

“Family members were told they were public employees,” Patrick Wright, director of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, a Michigan-based policy group, told FoxNews.com. “They are not public employees and this was not proper” . . .

Wright’s organization estimates that the SEIU reaped nearly $35 million from Michigan’s elderly and disabled from 2006 to last year. Of some 59,000 residents classified as home-based caregivers, about 80 percent stopped paying when they learned they did not have to.

The most charitable way to look at this scheme (promulgated by the former governor — Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat — and now repealed) is as a cynical scheme to allow a big Democratic interest to steal tens of millions of dollars from the elderly and disabled. Because if you suppose they were actually in earnest then what they’re saying is much, much worse.

If they were really in earnest, what Granholm’s policy was saying is that caring for people is the exclusive province of the government. The government will permit you to care for your family, but if you do, you work for the government. Implicit in that is the corollary: If you work for the government (by caring for your family), they can tell you what to do. Your family belongs to them.

Doubtless there are some progressives who see it that way, but I prefer to the Democratic party, in the main, is not yet fascist. I prefer to believe they are merely thieves.

There’s always the big national stories, like Obama taking away your health insurance, but the government attacks the people though malice or indifference in myriad smaller ways. Smaller, except for the people affected. Here’s a couple of stories from today alone. In Pennsylvania:

A widow was given ample notice before her $280,000 house was sold at a tax auction three years ago over $6.30 in unpaid interest, a Pennsylvania judge has ruled. . . The property sold for about $116,000, and most of that money will be paid to Battisti if further appeals are unsuccessful.

She owed $6.30, so the government sold her home out from under her, for $164,000 less than it was worth.

And in Florida:

A Florida mother is “beyond outraged” and still awaiting an explanation from school officials some two weeks after her son was allegedly ordered off a bus while in the throes of a diabetic seizure.

Cynthia Shepard of West Park, Fla., said her 16-year-old son, Andrew, suffered the seizure as he rode home from school. His 14-year-old sister, Jazmen, who was also aboard the bus saw her brother “twitching,” and promptly alerted the driver, who “did nothing,” according to Shepard.

“He was not helping her. She [Jazmen] went to the back of the bus to pick him up,” she told FoxNews.com. “The driver turned around and looked at him in his face and then told my daughter, ‘It’s your stop. You have to get off.'”

Once off the bus, Andrew continued to have a seizure on the side of the road, Shepard said. Paramedics were eventually called, and Andrew spent two days in the intensive care unit of a nearby hospital.

And there’s this postscript:

Each school bus is equipped with a security camera. But Shepard claims she was told footage from her son’s bus is “supposedly blank.”

I’m sure it was.