When Communism Came to America

Guest Post by Eric Peters

I got a letter in the mail the other day about what is styled by the government my shared responsibility payment – which the letter from the government says I “owe” (to the tune of $863.61) to the government because I did not hand over money to the health insurance mafia back in 2017.

It became a mafia when it began doing what the car insurance mafia had already been doing for decades – i..e, when it began using the government to make people hand over money for “services” they used to be able to say no, thanks to.

Of course, that was back when this country was still a free country (at least, more rather than less). If someone wanted to buy something, they could. It was once the case – if you can imagine it – that no one was forced to buy things they didn’t want. At least insofar as what was being sold by private, for-profit businesses.

The government being another matter.

But then it dawned on private companies that they could use the government to force people to buy what they were selling. So much easier than persuading people to buy. This was the American elaboration of fascism – the merger of corporate and government power.

You were forced by the government to buy car insurance.

If you failed to pay and got caught driving – or even if you didn’t but kept a car in your driveway or garage that was registered/tagged – the government would punish you by making you pay it for not paying the car insurance mafia.

Under Obama, the principle was applied to health insurance, which people were now forced to buy, too. And if they didn’t, the government would punish them for failing to handover money to the health insurance mafia by forcing them to hand over money to the government.

But there was a difference.

The punishment was not styled a fine, as is the case when a person gets caught driving his car (or keeping it tagged and registered, even if he keeps it off the roads) without having paid the insurance mafia. Instead, people who didn’t hand over money to the health insurance mafia were told they had a “shared responsibility” to pony up.

But to whom?

Why, the collective.

It is not merely that government has decreed you have an enforceable obligation to buy health insurance. It says we each have a shared responsibility to do so. Because you are “responsible” for other people – and they are “responsible” for you. The individual is nothing more than part of a collective, to which he owes “responsibility.” In plain language, he is no longer individually responsible for himself. But everyone is – somehow – “responsible” for everyone else.

This isn’t fascism. It is fascism’s doppelganger.

Communism.

The fascists tell us everyone who drives must buy car insurance in order that everyone be responsible for any harms they as individuals might cause. It does not matter that they haven’t actually caused any harm – nor that they may never cause any harm. They must still hand over money to the insurance mafia because they might – and it’s necessary to have such a policy to assure that individuals  are responsible if they do cause harm. (Leaving aside the impolitic fact that mandatory insurance hasn’t prevented irresponsible people from not paying for the harms they cause – nor prevented them from driving sans the insurance.)

But at least the putative premise is making sure individuals are responsible for the harms they might cause, even if they never actually cause harm to anyone.

This “shared responsibility” business is something far beyond that. It is an assertion of collective responsibility. It is similar to collective guilt – and just as odious a concept. Just by dint of the fact that you exist, you are (somehow) responsible. And you  “owe.”

Just as others “owe” you.

As bad as forcing people to buy car insurance was – and is – this shared responsibility business will lead to far worse. Because if you “owe” a shared responsibility to others to buy health insurance then you also implicitly “owe” a shared responsibility to others as regards their education, their housing and their feeding, too.

When responsibility is shared in this manner, of course, no one is responsible for anything, least of all themselves. And so everyone has an incentive to regard others as responsible for everything. When that becomes the defining modus operandi of a society, why should anyone be responsible for anything at all?

Of course, the downside to what might seem to some a bonanza of others being responsible for everything they want and need is that soon no one has anything – because why would anyone choose to be the sucker responsible for providing it?

And they ask me why I drink . . .

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