Nick Gillespie shares in The Daily Beast his concerns about the growth of the state, as exemplified by the latest National Security Agency scandal and the Obamacare rollout.

Each of these things underscores different but related aspects of the virtually unlimited state that has ruined the peaceful slumber of libertarian-minded Americans for decades. Whether we’re talking about surveilling citizens without any sort of serious legal oversight or forcing them to participate in economic activity in the name of healthcare über alles, the answer always seems to favor the growth and power of the state to control more and more aspects of our lives. Is it any wonder that a record-high percentage of Americans think the federal government is too powerful?

In an explosive story, The New York Times detailed the ways in which the NSA, which was originally supposed to spy on communications among foreign agents and provide intelligence on threats posed by non-citizen actors and governments, is increasingly focused on domestic activities. Since 2010, according to an NSA memo obtained by the Times, “The agency was authorized [by officials in the Obama administration] to conduct ‘large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness’ of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier.”

Through a process known as “contact chaining,” the NSA is able to suck up all sorts of email addresses, phone numbers, social media network information, and more without regard to the physical location or citizenship of each data point. The agency, reports the Times, then “enriches” that metadata “with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information,” and more. The result, as George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr puts it, is “the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.” …

… The legal justification for the NSA’s actions, according the Times, is the 1979 Supreme Court ruling that found “no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called.” A more recent yet equally unfortunate Supreme Court decision—the 2012 one upholding President Obama’s health-care reform plan—is the reason that the Obamacare exchanges are theoretically going to be up and running come October 1 (pay no attention to the massive and mounting delays with the program).

The clearest argument against Obamacare was always the specifically libertarian one against the individual mandate, or the idea that the government could force you not only to follow certain rules if you engaged in commercial or economic activity but that it could force you to engage in commercial or economic activity in the first place.

Like most federal laws dealing with powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution, the legislative reasoning behind the mandate is derived from the commerce clause, which gives Congress the right to “regulate commerce…among the several states.” Once interpreted by legislators and courts alike in a narrow sense, at least since the 1942 ruling Wickard v. Filburn, the commerce clause has been interpreted to allow the federal government virtually unlimited power. Indeed, during her confirmation hearing, Justice Elena granted that she believed Congress could legitimately pass a law mandating that people buy broccoli. While it would be a “dumb law,” she said would be constitutional.