Or so the mafia intends.

But the mafia may have just succeeded in pushing its "customers" too far. The latter word is bracketed in air fingers quote marks to ridicule the misuse of the word. When you are under duress to buy something by the seller of that thing, you are not a customer. You are a victim. In their better moments, some mafiosi admit the fact. They do not hide from the nature of their work; of themselves. But the insurance mafia is less self-aware; it likes to think of itself as just another business providing a needed service.

It likes to pretend there is no duress.

And that makes it worse than the mafia portrayed in movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas. Don Corleone, in a very real sense, was a more honest man than Flo.

So what has the mafia – the one that uses the government rather than Luca Brasi to make people offers it can't refuse – done to Virginia drivers? It has used its muscle (that is to say, its money power, largely derived from the proxy power it has to mulct drivers for "coverage") to get the politicians it keeps in its pockets (per the Don) like so many nickels and dimes to rescind what had been the only legal way to avoid being mulcted by the mafia.

In Virginia, a driver could pay the state a $500 Uninsured Motorist Fee instead. For many drivers, paying $500 to the state each year was better than paying the mafia twice or three times as much per year. But it meant the mafia was being paid less – and not just directly. The UMF provided a kind of competition – and that is the last thing any mafia wants.

Or will abide.

It wasn't just that the UMF enabled people who couldn't afford to pay the mafia a way for them to pay less. It effectively forced the mafia to charge everyone less – because its "customers" were aware that they could pay the state less instead. The UMF, in other words, acted as a check-and-balance on the mafia's depredations.