Another Loss of Freedom to Satisfy Socialists

Thanks to Western Rifle Shooters Association for this post.


Ace of Spaces has a great post taking apart Pelosi's claim that it is indeed fair to jail people who do not buy health insurance. A quote or two to whet your appetite:

The left continues pounding the table, insisting that right-wingers are "paranoid" and "extremist" to call Obama a socialist, or to use totalitarian imagery in posters to protest his agenda. Why, it's just so not true! they bleat. You'd have to be a maniac like Sarah Palin to make these delusional claims! Why, it's like bad science-fiction!

Really?

Socialism never attends a party without an escort of coercive state behavior. It is a historic fact -- indeed, an economic fact -- that as the state seeks to regulate and control more and more economic activity, they must, of course, control more and more human activity.

And this:

Back to this leftist insistence that we're all paranoid to even think this way, to even define "freedom" in an antique, right-wing fashion, meaning "stuff you are permitted to do or not do without penalty and coercion from the state:" It is especially risible to me, in gallows-humor way, that the left continues to call us lunatics for fretting about increasing state control and increasing state coercion and increasing state outlawing of previously-legal behavior and freedoms even as, in their very first bill out of the socialist box, they propose jailing Americans for engaging in unobjectionable behavior which no one ever before dreamt of being a crime.

Think about this.

The left says: You are crazy to claim your so-called freedoms are being taken away, and you are a lunatic to scream about an overly powerful state which will use violent coercion (no one goes to jail without the threat of violence if he doesn't, after all) to enforce its notions of the "economic good."

And with the next breath the left says: By the way, you shall either buy health care insurance or we will throw you in prison for two or three years.

Of course, this has been going on for decades. For a long list of all the ways we have been losing freedom by making previously legal behaviors crimes, see James Bovard's "Lost Rights." But in the past most of these lost freedoms were only practiced by a minority of people in the first place. Think smoking bans, for instance. It is easy for people to make something a crime when they don't see their own ox being gored, and when the minority isn't particularly liked. But the story changes when everyone is under threat. The one time they tried to outlaw a previously legal activity that was practiced by the majority was when Prohibition was passed. Ten years later it was repealed because it was so widely flouted. In that case, people could see the failure of the law. In this case though, they are building in such a constituency of people (111 new bureaucracies!) to continue agitating for it, that Obamacare will never be repealed.

But I'm a paranoid and extremist to take notice of the fact that what was once my freedom in 2009 shall become a cause for imprisonment in 2010.