Enslaved for Your Own Good

(Paul Jacob/Common Sense) – If government is “justified” in forcing you to buy health insurance for your own good — the fabled and perhaps fatal conceit of Obamacare — is it also justified in forcing us to keep up with “good” TV shows?

That’s the nutty notion floated at the satirical site The Onion, which drily reports: “FCC to Fine Americans Who Don’t Keep Up with TV Shows.” Seems too many office hours are spent explaining what happened on some iconic television show a co-worker missed. So the FCC is fining anyone who falls behind.

Hyuk, hyuk, get it? The government would never actually mandate television watching! No, it just makes us pay for boring documentaries on PBS.

Nor would the government ever issue commandments about when you can smoke on private property or even in your own homes. Or . . . would it?

But the government would never declare what you can and can’t eat, or what foods you can and can’t dish out. Right? Unless, that is, you’re a kid in a government-overseen cafeteria or a chef in a New York City restaurant prohibited from serving dishes containing the allegedly alarming ingredient of trans fat.

Well, the government would never require you to dutifully read even so salutary an e-letter as Common Sense, eh? (I’m pretty sure about this one.)

Whether the policy-makers’ notion of “the good” comports with your own doesn’t matter, of course. They’re the government, and they’re here to help.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.