ENEMIES OF ZEE STATE!

Every once in a while Ace steps up and hits one out of the park. Like this:

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. …

Furthermore, apart from the basic definitional aspect of socialism that requires a loss of freedom in exchange, supposedly, for economic security: Socialism has almost never worked as intended, but rather creates new problems and new poverties and new ways to exploit the system (black markets, for one); socialism therefore always requires even additional laws against once-unobjectionable and perfectly-legal behavior. …

And then it gets even worse after that, because it always fails, whenever it’s been attempted, and the newly-empowered state will fight to survive, as any organism does, and any organism is willing to do an awful lot of violence when its very existence is threatened. …

I go ’round and ’round with myself as to whether Nazi imagery is “civil” or helpful, politically: On one side I know for a fact that socialism tends in this direction. Every. Single. Time. Even in socialist states where fascism is avoided — Britain, say — it is nevertheless the case that the citizenry there exists under a much-diminished concept of “freedom” than your average American would find tolerable, or even imaginable. …

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. …

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. …

And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost. This is merely the first freedom they’ve realized, in advance, will have to be taken away. When their Rube Goldberg system of cross-subsidizations and stealth-rationing produces a slew of irrationalities and evasions they did not anticipate, we will have a welter of new crimes to correct all that human behavior they now find constitutes bad economic hygiene and must be outlawed. …

Used to be in this county when we proposed making an entire category of human behavior a crime, that was cause for debate. …

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.

I think Dylan put it best:

“You don’t need to pal around with a weatherman in the cubicle next to you for a decade as he babysits your kids and ghost-writes your memoirs to know which way the wind blows.”

And it’s blowing partly Commie with a chance of show trials.

(Via Allah: “Prison time for not buying insurance is authorized by the Good Intentions clause of the Just Looking Out For You amendment, if I’m not mistaken.”)