You are exactly right about the health care proposal being an encroachment on our liberty. You are also right to invoke the spectre of fascism. Fascism occurs when the government takes over and controls all private activity while leaving title to property nominally private. In other words, doctors are not state employees under fascism, but every aspect of their practice is controlled and supervised by the government. That describes precisely what the goal of all of the health care reform proposals on the Hill today.

As to the buffoon who commented in #1, maybe now you see why I always point out that Leftists point guns at everyone and anyone who disagrees with them. They have no idea what it means to peacefully persuade people to follow their course of action – they only know how to use brute force to bash your teeth in if you disagree with them. That is why their rallies always turn violent – because for them, it is all about using force against peaceful people. They have no clue – and no intention of leaving peaceful people alone. Their advocacy of the rule of brute force is another pillar of their fascist paradise.

With regard to your insightful comment about how the Left pretends to champion equality but applies that principle in the most discriminatory manner, I want to give you a lengthy quote from an article by Ayn Rand that connects your point with the Left’s advocacy of fascism. The quote is from her article, America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business, published in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Her use of the word “businessmen” can be interchanged with the word “rich” by the liberal fascist in #1 above:

If a small group of men were always regarded as guilty, in any clash with any other group, regardless of the issues or circumstances involved, would you call it persecution? If this group were always made to pay for the sins, errors, or failures of any other group, would you call that persecution? If this group had to live under a silent reign of terror, under special laws, from which all other people were immune, laws which the accused could not grasp or define in advance and which the accuser could interpret in any way he pleased—would you call that persecution? If this group were penalized, not for its faults, but for its virtues, not for its incompetence, but for its ability, not for its failures, but for its achievements, and the greater the achievement, the greater the penalty—would you call that persecution?

If your answer is “yes”—then ask yourself what sort of monstrous injustice you are condoning, supporting, or perpetrating. That group is the American businessmen.

The defense of minority rights is acclaimed today, virtually by everyone, as a moral principle of a high order. But this principle, which forbids discrimination, is applied by most of the “liberal” intellectuals in a discriminatory manner: it is applied only to racial or religious minorities. It is not applied to that small, exploited, denounced, defenseless minority which consists of businessmen.

Yet every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen. For instance, consider the evil of condemning some men and absolving others, without a hearing, regardless of the facts. Today’s “liberals” consider a businessman guilty in any conflict with a labor union, regardless of the facts or issues involved, and boast that they will not cross a picket line “right or wrong.” Consider the evil of judging people by a double standard and of denying to some the rights granted to others. Today’s “liberals” recognize the workers’ (the majority’s) right to their livelihood (their wages), but deny the businessmen’s (the minority’s) right to their livelihood (their profits). If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as “social gains”; if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as “selfish greed.” If the workers’ standard of living is low, the “liberals” blame it on the businessmen; but if the businessmen attempt to improve their economic efficacy, to expand their markets, and to enlarge the financial returns of their enterprises, thus making higher wages and lower prices possible, the same “liberals” denounce it as “commercialism.” If a non-commercial foundation—i.e., a group which did not have to earn its funds—sponsors a television show, advocating its particular views, the “liberals” hail it as “enlightenment,” “education,” “an,” and “public service”; if a businessman sponsors a television show and wants it to reflect h/s views, the “liberals” scream, calling it “censorship,” “pressure,” and “dictatorial rule.” When three locals of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters deprived New York City of its milk supply for fifteen days—no moral indignation or condemnation was heard from the “liberal” quarters; but just imagine what would happen if businessmen stopped that milk supply for one hour—and how swiftly they would be struck down by that legalized lynching or pogrom known as “trust-busting.”

Whenever, in any era, culture, or society, you encounter the phenomenon of prejudice, injustice, persecution, and blind, unreasoning hatred directed at some minority group—look for the gang that has something to gain from that persecution, look for those who have a vested interest in the destruction of these particular sacrificial victims. Invariably, you will find that the persecuted minority serves as a scapegoat for some movement that does not want the nature of its own goals to be known. Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

America has not yet reached the stage of a dictatorship. But, paving the way to it, for many decades past, the businessmen have served as the scapegoat for statist movements of all kinds: communist, fascist, or welfare. For whose sins and evils did the businessmen take the blame? For the sins and evils of the bureaucrats.

A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: “A hungry man is not free,” or “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.” Most people accept these equivocations—and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

Amazingly, this article was written in 1962! But it is just as applicable to today’s world.

Typical.

Let me try to spoonfeed this to you, my small-minded liberal friend. The government has no right to take over our health care industry. It is – get this now – unconstitutional. By the same token, our government has no right to force us to buy anything, including health insurance. That also is – pay attention again now – unconstitutional.

The issue isn’t about tax evasion. The issue is we are losing our liberty – thanks, of course, to fools like you who are all too willing to throw it away.

By the way, it is quite ironic that the so-called champions of *equality* think it’s OK to apply the law differently to some Americans merely because they are rich. Yes, throw those rich folks in jail! ‘Equal protections,’ as it were, only applies apparently when it can be used to ram their agenda down our throats.

That’s what the “hardship exemption” and “affordability credits” are for.
Only the wealthy, who can easily afford health care, will be subject to criminal penalty when they fail to pay the applicable tax. They would be charged with a form of tax evasion. Which already carries criminal penalties.

The federal government will provide affordability credits, available on a sliding scale for low and middle-income individuals and families, to make premiums affordable.

“Willful tax evasion”. You copy and paste it on your own blog and you don’t even understand it?

My advice is that you suck in that sow belly of yours, go to college and get some reading comprehension, and learn to live with universal health care.

Yankee moron.