Please explain how mandating that Americans buy insurance from private companies and offering subsidies for those who cannot is a step towards government ownership of the means of production.
GabuEx
The is more of a merger of the government monopoly of force and private corporate infrastructure and means of production. Actually, it isn't really socialism in a classic Marxist sense. This is socialism in a more modernist, 1930's fashion. It's more social corporatist...or as it was known in Europe back in the 1930's, national socialism. Now, you might favor the government using its monopoly of force to create a forced, captive market for corporations, but call it by its name. It's fascism, plain and simple. This goes beyond socialism. This is far scarier. This isn't the government plundering our fortunes to create a classless society. This is government plundering our fortunes to feed private corporations.
It will not stop here. When the domestic auto makers next encounter difficulty, they won't ask for a bailout. They will ask for a domestic automobile mandate that requires all Americans to purchase at least one domestically produced vehicle, whether they need it or not. Newspapers will begin to demand that the government force the American people to support their failed business model by asking for a newspaper mandate, requiring Americans to subscribe to a newspaper.
The next time that massive flooding hits the Mississippi, I fully expect the property insurance companies to ask for a flood insurance mandate that requires all American home-owners to purchase flood insurance, even if they live at high elevations well above any potential floods. They will claim that by forcing low-risk homeowners to purchase flood insurance, they will increase the "risk-pool" and ensure that there will be enough funds to cover the losses of the people that live in the flood-prone areas.
Don't forget, according to the unabashed statists that support mandates like this, this is perfectly legal because, according to them, the Constitution gives the federal government unlimited powers to regulate anything and everything that has even the most remote connection to "interstate commerce".
Ah, the commerce clause. That nifty little vague clause has been the cause of the most egregious subversion of the Constitutional principles of limited government and individual liberty in all of our history.
The commerce clause was originally intended to keep one state from using geography to hold other states hostage by preventing or taxing trade across borders. My oh my, how that little clause has grown. What was once just guarantee to southern planters that their cotton could cross Maryland & Pennsylvania on its way to the textile mills in Massachussets has become far more than it originally was. It is now the most important clause in our Constitution and forms the basis of practically all modern Federal law.
The Anti-Federalists were right. They predicted that this would happen. Sure, it took two centuries, but it happened. They predicted that the vagueness of the Constitution would be its undoing, and that none of the guarantees of individual liberty contained in it would stand the test of time and the twisting of politicians and judges.
So here we are, well passed the crossroads on a road that leads to a dead end and the death of the American spirit of liberty.
I think that the only hope left is insurrection. Oh sweet insurrection, grace our shores once more and bathe us in gore, for that tree of liberty is looking mightily dry and could use some fluid to quench its need.
EDITED: a few typos, I probably didn't catch them all
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