I’m sure you’ve all heard the news by now that the Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Healthcare Act:
In a dramatic victory for President Barack Obama, the Supreme Court upheld the 2010 health care law Thursday, preserving Obama’s landmark legislative achievement.
The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who held that the law was a valid exercise of Congress’s power to tax.
Many of my friends are cheering this ruling while many of my other friends, and much of the liberty sphere, are decrying this ruling. Personally I’m ambivalent. This ruling merely confirms what we’ve known all along, the federal government can put a gun to your head and force you to buy something. The way I see it the federal government is now being more honest about its intentions. In fact this ruling really helps rake in a the new wave of government transparency that Obama has been talking about.
I’ve said that two of the most egregious clauses in the Constitution are the ones granting the federal government a monopoly on interpreting the Constitution through the Supreme Court and the power to tax. It appears both of the clauses I hate so much have conspired to further erode our liberty. I’m not sure if this conspiracy was done to spite me but it proved my point and there is little I love more than having my ego inflated by being proven right. I hereby both thank the Supreme Court for helping inflate my ego and damning them for upholding the statist agenda.
I’m curious about the future, this precedence really sets up the federal government for future cronyism the likes of which we’ve never seen. If the federal government can force me to buy health insurance under the power to tax what else can they force me to buy? Can they claim high speed trains are such a social benefit that I must purchase yearly passes? Can they claim global warming is such an extreme danger that I must purchase carbon credits? Where will the lines be drawn? How far will this go? Will future bailouts come in the form of individual mandates instead of direct transfers of taxpayer money to failing businesses? We certainly live in interesting times.
With all of this said I believe the next question that must be answered by Obama’s supporters is this: Does the karmic value of passing this law and getting it upheld outweigh the karmic loss of murdering people overseas?
DO what I do go on facebook and argue the point with enough validity that you force your statist friends to ragequit.
I’m a bit more subtle in my debates. Instead of dumping facts I prefer to point out the logical paradoxes in their statements. For example, if one of my statist friends claims capitalists are exploiting laborers because they keep a portion of the laborer’s productive capability as profit and later claims the state has a right to tax I’ll ask something like, Is the definition of exploitation one of numbers? If it’s a single person keeping a portion of another’s labor capacity you claim it’s exploitation, if it’s a group of people taking a portion of another’s labor capacity you claim it’s taxation. How is one just while the other is unjust?
Eventually they either see the flaw in their statements or cease continued debate because they have no way of digging themselves out of the hole they dug.
I merely informed them that the government theoretically could tell everyone to buy a gun or pay a “tax” and according to justice Roberts it would be constitutional. I used guns because nothing gets under a leftists skin more than things that go bang.
Which brings me to the fact that the mandate was struckdown as enforceable by the commerce clause because that would give congress too much power, but he turns around and says they can still do anything they want by making it appear to be a tax.