"...first time the government has forced us to buy a product" MY ASS!

[Igel]

63. Imagine you're on the 3rd rung of a ladder.

You look down, and there are rungs below you. You look up and there are rungs above you.

Now close your eyes. You lose depth perception (you may remember relative depths, you may infer relative depths, but you're not perceiving depth).

Many of us look up and see layers of authority in a kind of hierarchy. Where I live there's the HOA; I have a mortgage. I'm in a county with laws and regulations, but no incorporated town so I have no town-level laws. There is a state government above my county, and above that there's the federal government with a mass of regulations and laws that many lawyers have trouble keeping straight.

My employer places certain restrictions on me, since I'm in a public job and have agreed to them. But my employer is also subject to restrictions and requirements by the state-level regulatory agency, and passes through some restrictions (usually grumbling as they do so). There are also federal regulations on what my employer must require of me.

All of those levels of authority above me are authority. To the man with no depth perception, they may all seem to be on one level, flat, so that the employer and the state government, the federal regulatory agency and the county fire safety authority are just "government". This makes things simpler than they are and simpler than they can be.

Home insurance results from a contract with your mortgage provider. You can drive all you want legally without auto insurance, as long as you don't go on public roads. Medicare is a tax and requires the purchase of nothing; if you decide not to use Medicare, you don't use it, but there's still the tax and the only way to opt out of paying the Medicare tax is to opt out of work. It's a penalty for work, if you want to view it that way--and that's fine, if there's no right to a job. (Otherwise you're being taxed for the exercise of your rights. How's that for a twist?)

We need a well-informed citizenry to maintain our republic. As Franklin said, we have a Republic--if we can keep it.