From Ace's excellent (and serious) essay Pelosi: It's Very Fair That We Jail You If You Don't Buy Health Insurance:
I'm paranoid? Really? I am not fretting here about some remote and
unlikely possibility. We are not speaking here of "slippery slopes" or
in terms of "what comes next?"
We are instead objecting to a black-letter law spelled out for all to see in the very first piece of legislation you're proposing.
Right out of the box. The state here -- Pelosi, Reid, Obama -- are
claiming that they can imprison people for behavior that has never
before even been hinted as being a crime, on the theory that such
behavior constitutes unpatriotic economic behavior which is detrimental to the state's balance sheets.
Think about what a broad, all-encompassing term "economics" is. 80%
of our waking hours are spent in economic activity of one sort or
another. The state here is asserting the right to imprison people
for behavior they consider not actually morally reprehensible or
harmful as other crimes are, but instead merely detrimental to the
Great Push Forward, the state's master plan of economic health and
well-being.
Right out of the box they propose sending people to jail for acting as economic subversives and economic traitors and yet I am, somehow, paranoid if I point out that the first step here is to reduce human freedom and increase state power.
And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first
of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost.
Read the whole thing.
