I remember not so long ago when people laughed and people trying to sue tobacco companies. It was common sense that pulling smoke into your lungs was not a healthful thing to do, but if you wanted to, well someone would supply the means. Basically you agreed to harm yourself and someone gave you a convenient and enjoyable (for some) way to do it.

Now, 2.5 decades on, the government(s) have done a spectacular shakedown of the industry, nearly banned it from every walk of life, even ones own car (if children/young state-units are in the car as well).

Now food is next. Fats, oils, sugar, white flour, etc etc.

People allow it, perhaps not knowing what is happening or how to do anything about it. I guess most people, even those who are liberty minded, go on, always coming down to “well at least there are no concentration camps or gulags, so this must not be so bad”!

But when the unfunded promises for health care and retirements comes to term, and trillions are needed to pay for all the procedures etc, we will see just how free we are, to smoke, drink, or eat. Proper food choices and exercise will probably be mandatory, or you will be put into a different pool for “benefit-rights” if not kicked altogether (though of course you will still labor for the allocators).

Personally I can’t think of anything more dystopian than having big brother tell you when and where and how you can do the simplest things. Such as screw in a light bulb, eat a sandwich, smoke a cigarette, cut your lawn, commute to work, discipline a child, the list goes on and on. Who needs a concentration camp when it’s the whole herd that is under attack? With concentration camps and gulags, it was specific people, ethnic perhaps, or a whole class, or a distinct region of people who needed to be herded into gated compounds and controlled. When the aim is control everyone, what they do with their everyday lives, camps aren’t necessary. As long as they are within an arbitrary boarder, they’re every action is up for review, criticism, and modification.

What people wouldn’t have stood for just a few decades ago are just a few years, or perhaps a decade, from becoming law of the land. It is disheartening when I discuss the ushering of Statism into our lives with the twenty-somethings of the world. They just shrug their shoulders. They’re so numbed to it from the socialist education they receive. They’re trained to acquiesce. They’re trained to take the rules shoved at them, and at the very least don’t stick they’re heads out of the fox hole if they have a problem with it. They’re trained to know that the deck is stacked against them, so learn to love it and just make peace with whatever indignity is done to them.