The State of New York spends money on many things we’d rather not see. Ads encouraging poor people to buy lottery tickets. Sinecures for political hacks. Subsidies for inefficient companies. The chance that employers who receive state dollars might use some of them to resist union organizing drives is not high on the list. But that was the “misuse of public funds” that state legislators chose to outlaw this week. A bill that the Senate and Governor Pataki have pledged to support, and which the Assembly has already approved, would forbid companies from using any state monies to “encourage or discourage” unionization. This superficial parity of language notwithstanding, this law might as well have been hand-written by Dennis Rivera, the president of the health-care labor union SEIU/1199 — and probably was.

A free market economy functions well when workers have the option of banding together in the quest for a higher price for their labor. But that option must be freely chosen. The new law would essentially muzzle employers who happen to do a lot of business with the state, such as hospitals and nursing homes, and prevent their employees from hearing the arguments against unionization. A hospital CEO could not so much as call a meeting on work time to discuss the issue, since the nurses and orderlies would be drawing salaries that are partially funded by Medicaid. It will not do to argue, as sponsors of the bill have done, that attaching these strings to state dollars leaves the government in a “neutral” position.

In any event it’s hard to believe that taxpayers, as a class, would support what Albany has done. The proposed law can only serve to drive up the costs of just about everything the state buys, especially health care. It occurs to us that no small number of tax dollars were used to perpetrate this piece of misgovernment: The unions who lobbied for it get most of their money these days from members on the public payroll — many of whom, under state law, are obliged to pay dues whether they want to or not. And then there are the salaries of the lawmakers and legislative staff members who spent time drafting, redrafting, and finally passing the bill. We want our money back.