I agree with Matt that describing Obamacare as slavery is a bad analogy.  However, I think it is important to insist on using the term “slavery” when it properly applies but people refuse to use it for truth-insensitive reasons. For example, I think Cuba is a slave society (see our book, pp. 47-50).  In Cuba, work is mandatory and the government decides who will produce what and at which salary under threat of punishment.  This is sufficiently analogous to the institution of slavery –for example, as practiced in the Antebellum South.  Some people (the government, slave owners) have the legal right to tell others what to do and when to do it.  They also unilaterally determine the amount of compensation, if any, and punishment for disobedience.  Restricting the term “slavery” to the situation in the Antebellum South while refusing to apply it to Cuba is symptomatic of discourse failure, that is, political statements that are not based on a desire to be truthful but on other reasons (posturing, for example.)  The objections to the analogy are unconvincing.  If someone says that people in Cuba are treated much better than slaves, then they should refuse to use the word “slavery” to describe those instances in the Antebellum South where slaves were well treated. If they say that, unlike the Cubans, slaves could be bought and sold, then they would have to say that athletes, university professors, and CEOs are also slaves.  The power to buy and sell someone else’s labor doesn’t seem to be a definitional characteristic of slavery.  Rather, slavery is defined by the legal (that is, coercive) power that some, the slave masters, have to direct the behavior of others. Ergo, Cuba is a slave society.