“Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes! Raise my taxes!” they chanted, lined up shoulder to shoulder for a few hundred yards stretching a street in front of the Capitol. http://bit.ly/d7CuZI

Before last week when is the last time you heard a citizen crying out in the public square, “Raise my taxes?”

I don’t know about you, but that was a first for me. What possibly could motivate such incredulous behavior?

That question is similar to the question the average reader has when perusing the account of Israel besieging Samuel for a king like the nations around them. Why would they want a man to be their king when they already had the God of the universe as their king? The answer is that the people were unhappy with their freedom and the accompanying responsibility under a theocracy. They wanted a king like the nations around them to tell them what to do. God warns them through Samuel that they will come under the complete dominance of the king (I Sam 8:10-17). The people respond, “No, but there shall be a king over us…to fight our battles.”

Look at who these people were in Illinois. They were public employees. They were members of a union that organizes public employees for the sake of collective bargaining. So what motivated them to board buses and descend upon the capital of Illinois with the war cry, “Raise my taxes!”

The answer is found by traveling to the Northeast and the state of New Jersey where the governor in an effort to take control of a debt spiraling budget is curtailing spending that will result in the loss of jobs in the arena of public service union territory. So, the war cry, “Raise my taxes!,” is the preemptive strike of union leadership who successfully convinced their members that it is better to raise taxes to temporarily sustain a failed system than to cut social services budgets and to preserve a state.

My mother, my civics teacher in high school and my college professor of the History of Civilization all sounded the same alarm. Study history and learn from the mistakes of others in history or you will repeat history.

It seems to me that the history of Israel teaches very clearly that if we exchange freedom under God with its accompanying personal responsibility for the assurance of government to provide cradle to the grave care we sacrifice freedom to gain servitude.

In the Illinois case what is more disturbing than the fool heartiness of the union strategy is the fact that this narrow segment of society is not saying, “Raise my taxes for my benefit.” But, they are saying, “Raise everybody’s taxes for my benefit. “ In effect they are petitioning the government to institute taxation without representation.

And, the establishment wonders why the Tea Party movement is gaining momentum.

Howard Eyrich is a minister in the PCA and currently serves as Pastor of Counseling Ministries at Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham. He is the author of the best selling pre-marital counseling guide Three To Get Ready, as well as Totally Sufficient and Curing the Heart both in 2nd editions. He and his wife, Pamela, have two children and eight grandchildren.