Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
There's a pretty significant difference between requiring people to help provide for defense of the country and requiring them to provide health care for other people.
And a significant similarity in that both laws required private citizens to purchase things by government decree.
Except that in one case, the government was already mandating that citizens serve in a militia. The law simply said that they had to bring their own gear. What it *didn't* require was that they bring gear for other people, nor did the gear they bring cease to be their own property at any point.
It is much more similar to requiring that children be inoculated prior to attending public school. And I might remind you, we also mandate that children attend public school or an approved alternative. Same deal. It's still an infringement, but a much much less intrusive one.
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That's supposedly the real issue -- can the government require private citizens to purchase something whether they want to or not? The 1792 law, regardless of its motives, did exactly that.
I'll also point out that it didn't require that they purchase anything, only that they have something in their possession. For most people, this was something they already had anyway, and it was generally a one time purchase. What the government is doing with health care is mandating a yearly cost into an insurance program. It also disallows any alternative method of achieving the same thing (health care). I'm no longer allowed toa simply pay out of pocket for health care. I *must* purchase my health care through an insurance medium.
Once you get past the very simplistic "they're making you buy something!" the analogy you're making falls apart. And to be fair, so is the one the SD lawmakers were making. The point being that the SD mandate is
less of a violation of the constitution, but would presumably be opposed by the very people who support the health care mandate.
I'm not a big fan of gotcha politics anyway, so it's not like I'm going to go out on a limb defending the approach. I'd rather make reasoned arguments about what the constitution says then make clever little comparisons like that.
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More to the point, the S. Dakota law that was designed to be unconstitutional was something passed a couple hundred years ago.
With a few differences, like that pesky requirement to be in the local militia. Look, IIRC there were also laws back then requiring each person to be part of the citizen bucket brigade to help fight fires, and they had to bring their own buckets. Are we going to make clever comparisons to that as well?
At the end of the day, what we're looking at is the reality that certain necessary public services (like military, fire, and police) have over time been shifted from being the obligation of each citizen to something that is publicly funded in some way. As we did this, the burden shifted from providing your service and whatever equipment may have been required to provide that service, to paying some form of taxes to pay for the same. We've shifted how we pay for those things, but not what to any great degree.
This represents a huge shift in the "what". It represents an assumption that there's some obligation on every citizens behalf to provide for the health care of every other citizen. Regardless of whether you believe that should be the case, it has never been assumed to be the case before, and certainly wasn't even remotely considered back when this country was founded. Even as we introduced systems like social security and medicare, they were framed in the context of each individual paying into a fund from which they receive benefits. If you never paid into them, you didn't get anything out. Only in recent decades, and over the protests and disagreements of conservatives, has the idea that health care is somehow a "right" and that the public has an obligation to provide it to anyone who needs it regardless of other conditions been put forth.
What the mandate represents in effect is about the question of whether or not we view providing health care to everyone as a public service on the same level as police, fire, and military protections. The pre-amble of the Constitution mentions "provide for the common defense", but no-where does it say that we must provide people with free medical care. Ultimately, it comes down to what we view as the role of government. And for some of us, we believe strongly that government should have the smallest role possible. Basic necessary services? Absolutely. You have to have them to have a working society. But you do *not* have to have publicly provided health care for a society to operate. It's not necessary.
And that may end out being the biggest constitutional question of all. Do we limit government's power to those areas where it must necessarily get involved, or do we allow it to involve itself into any area in which it perceives some kind of public good? If the latter, then where are the limits? Yes. Slippery slope. I know. But we're dealing with legal precedent here, so it's very appropriate to ask the questions: "What does this change in our approach to government power?" and "What is next?". Because in my opinion, if we allow this mandate, then there is effectively no limit to what government can get involved in, since there's really no limit to what services might fall under the umbrella of "public good". And of course, that leads us directly to a Brave New World style distopian future!