When you're grousing about the individual mandate as part of health care reform, you should remember to aim your ire where it belongs, and not where it will hurt progressive goals in the long run. Sirota makes a good point about where to draw the line:
[A]ttacks [on the individual mandate] could be construed to be a criticism of all compulsory policies. That's the conservative attack on mandates, of course, just like it is the conservative attack on taxes paid into social programs - namely, that anything the government requires individuals to do is unacceptable....
That's the thing that makes talk of populist alliance with teabaggers or libertarians to stop the health care bill or in fact help progressives on anything so misguided. Even if an alliance like that could help stop the bill, which it wouldn't, their rabid anti-government rhetoric is anathema to everything the progressive project envisions.
[H]ere's the difference on health insurance mandates that...progressives should internalize: It's perfectly OK to be against them if there is zero choice of a public option. if the Lieberman-gutted health care bill becomes law, it will be the first time in history a federal law will mandate that you buy a product from a private corporation as an obligation of being alive.....
[T]hat's really the key point - and why the public option has to be connected ideologically to the mandate. A mandate without a public option is different than paying taxes to the government for something like Medicare - it is, instead, being compelled to pay taxes, almost literally, to a private corporation....
I don't think it's bad for progressives to oppose laws that force the public to pay into something the public doesn't own...
I'm comfortable devoting some of my hard earned money to an entity I have a partial ownership stake in. Sure, my "ownership" stake is not huge nor particularly accountable - I'm one of 300 million people in this country, and the government that administers my ownership stake is insulated from genuine public control by campaign contributions, lobbying, etc. But at least I can have some modicum of direct influence over it through the ballot box.
You can't say the same thing about private corporations - those are dictatorships. And when those dictatorships exist in monopoly situations, as it does in the health insurance market, the customer-company relationship is a king-serf relationship. Forcing individuals to give those dictatorships and kings money without even a choice of a public institution the individual partially owns is immoral.
The mandate itself should never be attacked, just a mandate without a public option.
I disagree with him though on thinking that making common cause with libertarians on this issue would be OK. Progressives shouldn't extend even a temporary tactical acceptance to the anti-government ideologs of the right. Giving them any kind of legitimacy at all just helps to further erode the idea that government has a right - in fact a responsibility - to tax those most able to pay in order to provide services that benefit society as a whole.