Collective bargaining turns Teachers into Teamsters.

The American Conservative reports:

The Wisconsin Education Association, with 98,000 members, is perhaps the most powerful lobby in the state, even apart from its ability to call in support from the national union. The NEA requires its local affiliates to subsidize numerous full-time Unified Staff Service (“Uni-Serv”) professionals in every state. They have been called the finest field army in American politics and can achieve what might otherwise have to be accomplished through collective bargaining.

As former Education Secretary Bill Bennett once said of the NEA, “you’re looking at the absolute heart and center of the Democratic Party.” The NEA endorsed its first presidential candidate only in 1976—Jimmy Carter, in return for creating the federal Department of Education—but in recent years almost 10 percent of attendees at Democratic National Conventions have been NEA members.

The NEA’s extraordinary economic and political power is the result of one of those curious institutional accidents that can happen in a dynamic but structured economy like that of the United States. Occasionally, the framework of checks and balances that normally restrain an organized interest group gets broken. The interest then gets a chance to hold the rest of society to ransom and extracts what economists call “rents.”

Other recent examples: stockbrokers in the 1960s, who were able to make institutional investors like banks and insurance companies pay full commission rates when they bought or sold stocks because stock exchange rules forbade volume discounts; airline pilots in the 1970s, whose powerful unions extorted stratospheric salaries out of an industry straitjacketed by regulation; trial lawyers today, enriched by the interaction of contingency fees and the arbitrary judicial relaxation of liability law.

Eventually, the rest of society figures out that it’s being attacked by a rent-seeking parasite and does something about it. (We’re still working on the trial lawyers—also, by an amazing coincidence, a key part of the Democratic Party coalition.)

It's time to separate education from state.