Reason Magazine’s Jacob Sullum says in this column that the mandate for everyone to buy health insurance is unconstitutional and that people shouldn’t comply.
He discusses at some length the Supreme Court’s Commerce Clause jurisprudence, which has been a serious of politicized decisions that trashed the meaning of the Constitution in order to allow the federal government a free hand in dictating what economic actors — even a farmer growing crops on his land solely for his own use — may and may not do.
Bad as those decisions are, ObamaCare goes far beyond them. Ordering people to buy something or else face legal penalties is so far from the meaning of the Constitution that it’s laughable. It does, however, remind one of the Stamp Act of 1765 that got the colonists very worked up. It’s even worse than that, though. The government wasn’t trying to force everyone to buy its overpriced paper, but only those who wanted paper for some purpose. If the Stamp Act led to open defiance, a fortiori so should this.
In my view, THE article to read on this is Professor Richard Epstein’s magisterial “The Proper Scope of the Commerce Clause.” It’s in 73 Virginia Law Review, p.1387 (1987).
