Tag Archives: Coercion

Insurance at Gunpoint is Sick and Evil, by Eric Peters

Posted on December 10, 2016 | 1 comment

Insurance has become an offer you can’t refuse. From Eric Peters on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

There is nothing wrong with insurance … provided you can say no to it. Then it’s like any other thing you choose to buy.

Whether it makes sense to buy it – a subjective value judgment, by the way – isn’t the point. Exercise makes sense, too.

The point is – or should be – if insurance is something you want, or feel the need of – then you have the right to choose to buy it.

What you haven’t got is the right to force others to buy it – and thereby take away their free choice.

Insurance at gunpoint is dark and vicious. Anything that involves pointing guns at other people (who haven’t pointed a gun at you first) is necessarily a dark and evil thing. Someone – it doesn’t matter which specific individual does the wet work – is threatening to harm you unless you hand over money for something you do not wish to buy.

In ordinary language that’s a mugging.

Insurance at gunpoint is also an economic disaster. Not for the insurance company – which is really a mafia, because it uses force to coerce people to buy its services. It makes people an offer they can’t refuse. The insurance mafia makes a fortune. But the people who are forced to buy “coverage” get screwed.

Does this even need elaboration?

What happens to the price of anything when “customers” can’t elect not to buy that thing? Sure, there are different insurance “families.” You can “shop” the Gambinos (GEICO) or go with the Genovese (Allstate).

But you can’t say no.

To continue reading: Insurance at Gunpoint is Sick and Evil

 

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She Said That? 6/29/16

Posted on June 29, 2016 | 1 comment

Ayn Rand has probably made SLL’s quote of the day more than anyone else. Probably because she had more to say than anyone else. From Rand (1902- 1982), Russian-born American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter, Atlas Shrugged (1957):

“Did you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”

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The Truth About Politics, by Lew Rockwell

Posted on February 1, 2016 | Leave a comment

A comparison between capitalism and government. Capitalism wins. From Lew Rockwell on a guest post on theburningplatform.com:

The very first votes of the 2016 presidential election season will be cast tonight in the Iowa caucuses. This is supposed to fill us with happy thoughts about self-government, civic virtue, rational deliberation, and about politics as the way the people’s will is put into effect.

But to the contrary, we should spurn what the establishment would have us celebrate. Politics operates according to principles that would horrify us if we observed them in our private lives, and that would get us arrested if we tried to live by them. The state can steal and call it taxation, kidnap and call it conscription, kill and call it war.

And yet we are taught to fear capitalism, of all things.

But what, after all, are capitalism and the free market? They are nothing more than the sum total of voluntary exchanges in society.

When we engage in a voluntary exchange – when I buy apples for five dollars, or when you hire someone for $25 per hour – both sides are better off than they would have been in the absence of the exchange.

We can’t say the same for our interactions with the state, since we pay the state under threat of violence. The state sure winds up better off, though. That’s for sure.

Business firms that increase their profits thanks to some new innovation cannot rest on their laurels. Other firms will adopt the innovation themselves, and those abnormally high profits will dissipate. The original firm must continue to press forward, striving to devise still newer ways to please their fellow men.

The state operates under no such conditions. It can remain as backward as it likes. Other firms are typically prohibited from competing with it.

The state’s priorities arbitrarily override your own. Ethanol “is important for the farmers,” one candidate says. So because the state has decided some interest group’s foolish and economically nonsensical pet project is “important,” what you yourself would have preferred to do with your money is simply set aside and ignored, and you are forced to subsidize what the state seeks to privilege.

Our schools and media portray corporations as sinister, and government as benign. But who wouldn’t rather take a sales call from Norwegian Cruise Line than an audit demand from the Internal Revenue Service?

To continue reading: The Truth About Politics

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