You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.-Inigo Montoya

To what word am I referring? Well, freedom, of course.

I was recently reading a series of posts saying that the ACA is violating your freedom by requiring people to get insurance. You mean like before, right? When getting a diagnosis of a disease meant from now on you were stuck at a job because you could not afford to switch jobs. Your boss could mistreat you, make you work overtime /o pay, refuse to give you wages. But you COULD NOT switch jobs because now you have a ‘pre-existing’ condition if you lose your insurance. That doesn’t sound very free. That sounds like indentured servitude.

And taxes and regulation aren’t a lack of freedom, either. Paying taxes for things you don’t want isn’t a lack of freedom. It’s part of living in a society. If we could pick and chose, that rural road would never get paved. Why would people voluntarily pay for a road they’d never use? And things like child labor laws and safety regulations exist because without them companies would hire 8-yr olds and require people to work in ridiculously unsafe conditions. We know this because history proves it.

When people say people just need to exercise their right for choice, the premise of Libertarianism, it ignores a fundamental truth: The difference in power between groups. If I am desperate for a job,  I can’t really fight with a potential employer if I need a job to survive. Or almost survive, as is most often the case these days. If you’re having a heart attack you can’t shop around for the best deal on hospitalization. This natural difference in power is why we need government. Everything from keeping armed gunmen from taking what they please from us to making sure we get paid for all the hours we work.

Ceding the right for redress is the OPPOSITE of increasing our freedoms. Expanding the power of the already powerful is not increasing freedom. The ACA makes millions just a little more free to pursue job opportunities. Minimum Wage laws and overtime rules, etc. place minor limits on how much employers can exploit their workers. In truth we need to rebuild unions (especially for service workers) to equalize power just a bit more. But until that happens, the government is the mechanism to help beat back the lack of freedom that comes from too much power in the hands of a few very wealthy people.

You keep using the word freedom….but you don’t know what it means