Permission Slips
Sunni Maravillosa at The Price of Liberty - good rant on the increasing need to ask the gummint for permission to do anything. Driving, flying, marriage, cutting hair, carrying self defense tools, building your house on your land, buying medication. All illegal without permission. [price]
Here's the most egregious permission slip I've yet encountered: the prescription. For many individuals, myself included, these papers are thinly-disguised permission slips to live in a reasonably healthy manner. What else can you call the repeated requirements to: a) pay a permission-slipped medical practitioner to write you a piece of paper saying you're "allowed" to have a certain quantity of a certain substance for a certain period of time; and b) pay another permission-slipped medical practitioner to give you that medicine -- and enter your information into a huge medical database that the nanny-ninnies are scheming to get their hands on?