According to a recently-released letter from the Joint Committee on Taxation, any individual who willfully abstains from purchasing a government health plan (under your H.R. 3962) will face severe criminal penalties, up to and including incarceration.

Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

Let me get this straight: Anyone who, for whatever reason, refuses to subsidize this corporate welfare to the tune of $15,000 per year, will be thrown in the general population with rapists, murderers, burglars and the rest of the unsavory lot of real, violent criminals, at an annual cost-to-taxpayers of approximately $31,000, and net annual dead-weight loss to the economy in excess of $100,000.

Anyone of us who rejects this one-size-fits-all fascist monstrosity, which you command we buy, will go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Directly. To. Jail.

Allow me to cast this in a different light:

• Maybe someone can’t afford the policy.  No matter, you determine what we can afford.
• Maybe someone doesn’t want the policy, or wants something a little better or a little worse.  No matter, you determine what we are permitted to obtain.
• Maybe someone legitimately doesn’t need a policy.  No matter, you will cannibalize his contributions to provide for others.

According to you, disagreement (regardless of how principled or well-reasoned), the exercise of a different opinion as to what one can or cannot afford, prefers or does not prefer, needs or does not need, will be punishable by incarceration.

This is not the mark of a free society.

It is the sort of thing one expects from a society that is, each and every day, backsliding and hopelessly leeching the last drops of productivity from those precious few still willing and able to produce anything of value. Like vandals and drug-addicts ripping the copper wire from the last abandoned buildings and unsecured air-conditioners hanging from 1st-story windows in downtown Detroit, there is nowhere to turn once those veins are bled dry. When you run out of victims, it’s game over.

And you are running out of victims.  Although all of humanity deserves it, this is not a plea.  I refuse to beg you for the what we deserve, and I have learned never to expect sympathy from tyrants.

Neither should tyrants expect any sympathy from those they oppress.