Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Bothered in the Broccoli Republic

If the government can propose to fine me, and end up taxing me, for not buying health insurance, then the analogies to compelling me to buy broccoli or fork out to the IRS are the least of it. Can Washington produce a law requiring that all writers produce a minimum quota of prose in praise of Obamacare, or of Congress, or of the president himself — or be forced to pay a penalty?

The Rosett Report » Bothered in the Broccoli Republic
Claudia Rosett June 30, 2012

Dear Uncle Sam,
Forgive me. Although I am a loyal citizen, and despite all the excitement this past week at the Supreme Court, I have not read the entire “Affordable Care Act.” Nor do I want to. I’m not even sure exactly how long it really is, though once any document runs to more than 2,300 pages (which this does), it strikes me that it might be more efficient to skip such niceties as pagination, and just weigh it.
I do know that if you go to the federal web site Healthcare.gov, which I saw advertised on TV Thursday evening (who paid for that, by the way? Was it We, the Penalty Tax Payers? Or are broadcasters required to subsidize this?), you can find the full text of the law, conveniently broken up into Big Gulp-size sections. These are accompanied by a note that the sections “have been excerpted because presenting the Act in a single PDF results in a very large file which may present download difficulties.” (For real diehards, there is also a link to the full 4+ megabyte PDF file. Beware — I tried it, and had to reboot my computer.) ...

All that said, however, I do have a few questions. Actually, I have a lot of questions. But to sort them all out and align them with the wildly shifting arguments that have gone into this law would leave me no time to earn the income to pay the tax, or the penalty, or the insurance premiums, or whatever it is we’re now calling it  – there seem to be a lot of plans right now to take a lot more of my income, and very little of that seems to be going to my actual doctors.
So, for the moment, I have boiled it all down to three questions (though, in the spirit of our esteemed authorities in Washington, they have subsections):
1) Has President Obama himself actually read this entire law? 
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