Via Glenn, Joshua Micah Mackie Packie Paisely Marshall writes perhaps the most ridiculous thing ever rendered in pixels:
“Amazing. A year ago, no one took seriously the idea that a federal health care mandate was unconstitutional. And the idea that buying health care coverage does not amount to ‘economic activity’ seems preposterous on its face. But the decision that just came down from the federal judgment in Virginia — that the federal health care mandate is unconstitutional — is an example that decades of Republicans packing the federal judiciary with activist judges has finally paid off.”
This is apparently some new usage of “activist judge” JoMiMa has pioneered, meaning “actively doing things left-liberals don’t like, such as actually interpreting the Constitution rather than just going along with whatever legal justifications we’ve invented to do whatever it is we want to do.” That would be egregious enough by itself, but the notion “no one” was taking the constitutionality argument hopefully just means “no one JMMPPM has been reading in his left-liberal bubble” because otherwise it makes me wonder who does Josh’s breathing for him, as this claim is so poorly considered that I can’t imagine brain stem function has survived whatever trauma has affected Josh’s higher reasoning centers, since the topic has been being hotly debated since well before the law was passed. (Also “not taken seriously” a year ago: Scott Brown’s candidacy, the Tea Party, and the notion the GOP could take back the House.)
As any fool can see, if the government has the power to force you to buy health insurance, it has the power to force you to buy all sorts of things. When Don Surber asks “Can the government tell you to get a haircut, hippie?” he is assuredly being facetious, but in the spirit of newly taking things seriously, let us examine the proposition.
The reason we need to force people to buy healthcare is, of course, because we are also passing a law that says insurance companies must insure you, even if they know they will lose money because what you’re “insuring” against has already happened (this also violates the constitutional rights of stockholders in insurance companies, but we’ll leave that aside for the nonce). Now, even statists have the modicum of sense necessary to realize forcing insurers to sell “insurance” to people who have already experienced the event they are supposedly “insuring” against is going to create a death spiral of people not buying “insurance” until they they experience such an event, especially when the state is also forcing insurers to cover sex changes, aromatherapy, 12 years of explaining to a psychiatrist how the clown faces on your childhood wallpaper have scarred you, and anything else the interest group du jour can bribe legislators into enacting as law, such that “insurance” is ridiculously expensive anyway. So the state has a compelling interest to force you to buy health insurance, so it can force insurers to sell you insurance and also force them to cover things you might not want, all for your your own good, because you are too stupid and the insurance companies too evil to be allowed to enter into voluntary contracts on your own, plus that aromatherapy lobbyist chick is really hot and legislators really, really want to interface with her body politic. Clear so far?
So, using the twisted logic of Obamacare, can we argue similarly for support of SurberCare and its mandated haircuts? Yes We Can! — and we don’t even need to employ the excuse of other laws we’re trying to pass to do so. You see, it’s prima facie obvious that hair length in men is correlated to lower incomes (partly due to the fact many employers have grooming codes), and per Kelo tax revenue is a compelling enough interest to set aside property rights. So get a haircut and get a job, hippies! It’s going to be the law soon.
Comments
20 responses to “Clowns To The Left Of Me”
SurberCare!
All who support government cuts should get behind it!
(And as you have made clear, the cuts are both “necessary” and “proper,” so they are constitutional.)
There are two separate issues here, whether the individual mandate is a good thing, and whether it is also constitutional.
I don’t like the individual mandate, but I see no difference between being forced to buy auto insurance, and being forced to buy health insurance. In each case a public good is at stake. In each case I have (for now) a choice of vendors, so it’s not as if I’m being fed to a monopoly. (And there are lots of publicly regulated monopolies, to which most of us pay the electric bill.)
That’s separate from the question of whether the Constitution forbids the mandate, which seems trivially to be legal under the commerce clause.
As has been pointed out ad nauseam, you are NOT required to buy auto insurance. You are required to buy auto LIABILITY insurance when operating a vehicle on public roads because you have purchased a large, deadly, fast-moving piece of equipment for which the state must license you to operate in the midst of other large, deadly, fast-moving devices.
Liability insurance is insurance. And the public road is what I must travel to work or buy food. Seems like an individual mandate to me, unless you’re suggesting that I walk the seven miles to town.
Liability insurance is obviously not the same as collision or theft insurance. One is designed to protect you from loss and is not mandatory, the other is designed to protect others from injury inflicted by you and is mandatory.
Also, millions of people don’t drive cars, and thus avoid buying auto liability insurance, while others are legally prevented from driving at all.
No one is suggesting we buy “health liability insurance” as though our health were a large, deadly, fast-moving device that the state needed to license and regulate. The comparison is extremely silly.
No one’s talking about collision or theft coverage. We’re talking about the mandatory coverage, which as you helpfully point out is liability only.
Sure, I can avoid it, like millions of others. But in my rural community, if you don’t drive a vehicle, more than likely you don’t work. Which, come to think of it, would help me avoid Social Security taxes too. But it’s not what I’d call a viable option.
You also don’t address the other obvious comparison to publicly regulated monopolies like electric utilities or, until recent years, phone companies. My individual choices are restricted in the name of a greater public good. It’s not a new idea.
And that sort of thing is why I don’t read Marshall.
“Nobody”, eh? Well, maybe “nobody” he takes seriously, which is to say, nobody that isn’t a Progressive, I guess.
Don: The Federal government does not force you to buy car insurance of any sort.
The States do, and they probably also have the Constitutional power to force you to buy health insurance – though since they can’t force anyone to offer it and insurers can just leave the market, they won’t try.
I don’t like the individual mandate, but I see no difference between being forced to buy auto insurance, and being forced to buy health insurance.
You are not forced to buy auto-insurance, any more than you are forced to buy a car.
Seems like an individual mandate to me, unless you’re suggesting that I walk the seven miles to town.
You have the option of walking seven miles to town, or hitching a ride, or taking a bus, or riding a bike. You won’t have any options where health-care is concerned.
You also don’t address the other obvious comparison to publicly regulated monopolies like electric utilities or, until recent years, phone companies.
You are not required to use the telephone or the electricity grid either. What part of the words “mandatory” and “required” do you not understand? When Congress passes a law mandating that you have a phone and electricity in your home, you’ll have a point. Until then, you do not.
Joshua Micah Mackie Packie Paisely Marshall writes perhaps the most ridiculous thing ever rendered in pixels:
You should probably make a macro for that if you’re going to read him much.
As for auto insurance, as all have noted, some people don’t have it.
If you want to avoid it, you can avoid it.
You can only avoid Obamacare if you aren’t alive. Which seems to be the option favored by most proponents (If you don’t like it, drop dead! might be a good selling point)
What happens when buying a Government Motors care becomes mandatory?
It’s Interstate Commerce (Hosannaaaaaaas!), it directly affects the nation (don’t want to send those jobs overseas) and, as many note, most people need a car.
So let’s require all people to buy an American-(Canadian, Mexican, Brazilian, British)made GM vehicle and then the auto insurance analogy suddenly works too.
That’s just win/win and all Constitutional and stuff.
Collision and theft insurance insure the car itself, and are thus more like health insurance — that’s why they’re relevant. Auto liability insurance doesn’t insure the auto, it insures the damage you may cause while using it, and is thus unlike health insurance.
It’s an entirely ridiculous comparison, and it’s disingenuous for Dems to talk about “auto insurance” when they are really talking about liability insurance. Liability insurance is mandated for all sorts of dangerous activities precisely because it affects other people. The only reason they are trying to mandate health insurance is because they’re also trying to turn “insurance” into something that isn’t insurance at all.
Guvmint can req
the state must license you to operate
Nope. You don’t need a licence to operate an automobile.
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/3450008-drivers-license-not-required
http://blog.infreedomscause.com/main/?p=218
BTW without a drivers license you can’t get insurance.
TallDave, you’re right that car liability insurance is different than health insurance, but they are similar in ways that matter. If you don’t carry liability, and injure someone with your car, you can’t pay for the damage you caused AND the victim is likely to become medically indigent and a public burden. If you don’t carry medical insurance for yourself, and you become ill, you can become medically indigent and a public burden, and/or the hospital that cares for you takes a big loss. Either way there’s a public interest at stake, not just a private one.
Flenser, of course I have the freedom not to own a car, walk everywhere, and have no phone or electricity. Just doesn’t seem like much of a choice. There’s not much difference between “do it because you just have to” and “do it because if you don’t you have to live in the 19th Century” isn’t enough to care about. Not for me, at least, and I’m a guy who chooses to drive everywhere so I don’t get groped at the airport.
Perhaps we could agree on the constitutionality of universal coverage if it weren’t private. I’d gladly pay higher taxes for a public health service, and let the health insurance industry go to hell.
Guvmint can require you to fulfill specific conditions if you desire to take part in certain activities that might affect others.
So, IF you wish to drive a car upon the public roads, then you have to prove, up front, that you can and will pay for damages or injuries that you might cause. (Of course, most states allow you to get by with such small amounts of coverage these days that you’re not even coming close to being able to cover more than minor injuries, which is why any driver with brains buys the absolute highest amount of UM/UIM coverage possible (which is surprisingly cheap, and covers what other drivers should have paid you for your injuries but was beyond their coverage)- so when the guy with the $20,000 minimum coverage plows into you and sticks you in the hospital for ten weeks and wipes out a year’s worth of your income, your own $500,000 UM/UIM coverage will make up for it.)
But for ObamaCare, there’s no “IF”. You can chose not to drive, but choosing not to live creates its own set of problems far beyond insurance issues.
“You don’t need a licence to operate an automobile.”
I used to get lots of you guys coming in to my practice for defense on the Driving After Revocation/Suspension charges. They’d all want to pay me with gold coins or silver certificates, the only police authority they’d recognize was the Sheriff, they’d want me to cite the Magna Carta in their defense, and they all, uniformly, seemed to forget that, while the fed transportation code sections just did trucking, state statutes encompass automobiles.
So, no, if anyone reading this believes that “You don’t need a licence to operate an automobile”, it’s wrong – you really do need the license.
Bobby B.,
It is not something I believe. I actually can cite case law.
Now the questions are:
1. Is it more trouble than it is worth?
2. Can you convince a judge or does the case get expensive (appeals)?
If you don’t carry medical insurance for yourself, and you become ill, you can become medically indigent and a public burden, and/or the hospital that cares for you takes a big loss.
If you’re indigent you can’t afford insurance anyway, and the hospital will presumably submit your bills to Medicaid. If you aren’t indigent they will send you a bill.
You don’t need to pay the phone company to use the phone (Gmail has a nice app for this), and you don’t need the electric company to generate your own electricity.
But again, you’re eluding the main point here, which is that if the gov’t can force you to buy insurance, then it can force you engage in all sorts of economic activity. I’d prefer not to live in a totalitarian system.
TallDave, hospitals routinely take big losses for indigent care. (They used to be able to shift those costs to paying customers, but that’s gotten harder of late.) Indigent patients frequently give a false address for fear of getting a bill. Medicaid doesn’t just pay bills for non-Medicaid patients. If the hospital is a public good, then losses to the public hospital should be considered.
Or consider this very frequent scenario: lacking mental health care, a guy gets into a crazy beef and gets arrested and jailed. Now he’s in the care of the state, at high cost, when the whole thing could have been prevented had he been able to affort health coverage (and complied with it). Again, there’s a public interest at stake.
To be sure, the health insurance companies don’t give a rat’s ass about the public; they just want to force people into the pool to avoid the adverse selection problem.
But the point I’m making is that it isn’t totalitarian to identify a public interest and balance it against an individual’s rights. Sure it can be done wrong. In this case I wish it had gone differently, with a single-payer program supported by tax dollars. But this “you can’t force me to do anything that costs me money” idea is insupportable, unless you want to live in a society of one.
But the point I’m making is that it isn’t totalitarian to identify a public interest and balance it against an individual’s rights.
That’s the definition of totalitarianism.