A Better Minnesota, by fiat

So the Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn essentially put the brakes on forcing a union into the affairs home health care and day care providers. That should be the end of it, right? Not if you're Mark Dayton:

 DFL Gov. Mark Dayton showed no signs of backing down from the legal fight. A spokesman said the state will not drop its challenge to the lawsuit.

“The court has voted to roll back the cause of civil rights in America,” Dayton said.

That's crap, of course. It's never quite been clear how forcing an unwanted third party into a negotiation furthers the cause of civil rights, but while it always appears that there are many strange alleyways in the brain of our governor, he's actually very good at doing what his job really is -- the care and feeding of third parties.

The primary purpose of modern liberalism is to reward third parties, who are almost always liberals, by inserting them into all manner of public policy debates. You see it all the time: the environmentalists who throw sand in the gears of things like the PolyMet mine; the urban planners who jam down light rail lines on communities that don't want them and that don't benefit from them; the Michael Bloombergs who precisely calibrate the proper size for a soft drink cup. The list goes on and on, because these third party liberals are everywhere. And all of these third parties use the muscle of government to force themselves into business relationships and personal relationships, too.

If you are Mark Dayton, your sole purpose is to facilitate these third parties, who insist that they are providing a Better Minnesota. Does a family-run day care need a union? Of course not, but by thunder, the union has to be part of it, because they are delivering a Better Minnesota. And they will not go quietly:

State DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin called the ruling “devastating” and said it jeopardizes 100 years of union advancements wages, benefits and working conditions.

U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., said the Supreme Court decision was one “nugget” in a larger fight.

“It’s a bad ruling … but it’s not going to stop us from organizing,” he said on MSNBC. “They may have more money, but we’ve got more people, and organized people beat organized money.”

As usual, Ellison is projecting more than a 20-screen multiplex. The organized money in this case is all on his side; the mom-and-pop operations they are trying to muscle in on are only loosely organized, at best. As for Martin, he's just waving the bloody shirt to help his fundraising, as the Star Tribune points out:

Highlighting the high-stakes political ramification of the ruling, DFLers sent out a fundraiser immediately after the decision urging people to fight back.

Of course he is. A Better Minnesota costs money and if the Supremes won't let his pals extract it by fiat, he has to ask for it. And that is what this case is really about -- as we've learned in Wisconsin, public sector unionism is entirely dependent on extracting dues by fiat from the people it purports to represent. Martin would rather not have to ask for money.