Sick and Evil
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.
Current Prices on popular forms of Silver Bullion
In ordinary language, that’s a mugging.
That the mugger may give you something you don’t want in exchange for violently separating you from the contents of your wallet doesn’t change the nature of what has happened any more than a rapist picking up the check for the hotel room makes what he did something less than rape.
Take away the element of consent, freely given – and what you’re left with is an assault.
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.
The insurance mafia knows the value of this – which is why they got into bed with the government, which serves as their Luca Brasi. Without the threat of Luca, many of us – me among them – would be able to decline insurance altogether when the premiums became onerous, especially when they became so for no legitimate reason.
In that scenario, you get a letter from them one day notifying you that they have increased your rates because you got a ticket for “speeding” – a manufactured offense against a statute that caused no loss to anyone’s person or property. You call them up and tell them to cancel the policy unless they rescind the rate increase. Imagine the effect on the cost of insurance.
Which is why we are not allowed to say no.
But the most sinister aspect of mandatory car insurance is that it establishes the principle that forcing people to buy insurance generally is legitimate. Which is why we are now forced to buy health insurance, too.
And it is why, I am certain, a time will come when we are forced to buy home insurance (even if our home is completely paid for) as well as life and gun insurance, too. There is a lot of money to be made – that is, taken at gunpoint.
And why not?
If we can be forced to buy car and health insurance is there any logically sound defense against being made to buy these and other kinds of insurance? What principle would work as a defense against such a proposal?
Never before in history have so many people been “covered.” It is no coincidence that so many of people are also living hand-to-mouth. Not because they have incurred losses. But because they are “covered.”
One of the reasons I am reluctant to buy a car to replace the truck my soon-to-be ex-wife now has is because it will mean paying got-damned insurance (and property taxes and registration fees). If I swap-buy the old motorcycle a friend of mine has offered to swap-buy for just a few hundred bucks, I can evade the insurance by hanging one of my other bikes’ tags on it. How many squealing enforcers could tell the difference between a ’83 Honda and a ’84 Honda?
It’s a chance I am willing to take. Feed ’em fish heads!
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