What they have in common is that they are two pieces of a giant puzzle. Put together, they place the government in the position to regulate or control almost every detail of our daily lives.
In democratic systems, the taking of freedom is always cloaked in a patronizing, slaveowner-style benevolence.
From Steyn's Green Totalitarianism:
In the name of “the environment,” the state gets to regulate everything you do. The cap-and-trade bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, for example, is a bold assault on property rights: in order to sell your home—whether built in 2006 or 1772—you would have to bring it into compliance with whimsical, eternally evolving national “energy ef?ciency” standards, starting with a 50 per cent reduction in energy use by 2018. Fail to do so and it would be illegal for you to enter into a private contract with a willing buyer.
And Lindzen:
MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen has warned: "'He who controls carbon controls life. It is a bureaucrat's dream to control carbon dioxide." Washington, D.C., and the U.N. are in a field of dreams right now as they envision one of the most massive expansions of controls on human individual freedom ever contemplated by governments.
Same idea applies to government medicine which, it is estimated, would create 111 new bureaucracies. Even an Office of Administrative Simplification (not kidding). As Mike Pence said yesterday:
As President Ronald Reagan said: “Since the American founding, we have been a people with a government, not the other way around.”
Now comes the Pelosi plan for a government takeover of health care. It is a freight train of runaway spending, bloated bureaucracy, mandates and higher taxes. If the liberals in Washington have their way, they will forever change the relationship between the government and “we the people.”
If the Pelosi plan for a government takeover of health care passes, we will each become dependent on the political class in Washington for the provision of services of the most urgent and personal nature.
Illness, our own, or more importantly the illness of a parent, or a spouse, or a child, has the capacity to suspend our priorities.
What was important before the crisis grows dim in the harsh light of disease affecting a loved one.
The Pelosi health care plan targets us when we are most vulnerable.
The Pelosi health care plan makes us dependent on the state at the most urgent moment in the life of our family.
Their hope: that little by little, we’ll yield our freedoms and our resources to the ever-growing appetite of the federal government.
One commenter on Althouse's piece on constitutionality, mandated insurance, and the Commerce Clause observes:
Debate this all you like.
I have a message for the Supreme Court and the Congress: Put me in fucking jail.
I will not be forced by you to purchase health insurance.
Period.
And if you try to force me to, you'll reckon with me.
As the Monty Python song goes:
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the loooord's consent.
Yeah, yeah,
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
(na na na na)
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
(na na na na)
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
(na na na na)
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent
Then the villeins and the ploughmen got to have the lord's consent...
