Politics & Power Quote by Matt Blunt

Liberty is doing a lot of work here, and not all of it is neutral. Matt Blunt frames the question of unions and parties as a pure matter of individual consent, a clean, almost consumer-rights version of workplace politics: you should opt in, you should sign, you should choose. It’s a rhetorically canny move because it shifts the audience from thinking about collective bargaining power to thinking about personal autonomy and paychecks. “Money out of the pockets” is tactile language, designed to make dues feel like a pickpocketing rather than a shared investment.

The subtext is less about freedom than about leverage. Public-sector unions survive on reliable dues; requiring “proper consent” isn’t just a procedural nicety, it’s a pressure point that weakens the infrastructure that funds organizing, bargaining, and often Democratic-aligned political activity. By bundling “service union, political party or other organization,” Blunt collapses a union’s workplace role into the same category as partisan affiliation, inviting suspicion: these groups aren’t protectors, they’re special interests.

Context matters: this kind of language rose alongside the broader conservative push in the 2000s to curb public-employee union influence, especially in states where unions were central players in elections and budget fights. It also pre-echoes later “right-to-work” and post-Janus arguments that treat compelled fees as a moral violation rather than a labor-policy tradeoff. The quote works because it speaks in the ethics of consent while quietly re-engineering the balance of power at work.