I’m writing this the day before the United States Supreme Court is expected to announce its ObamaCare decision. It’s possible that the court will rule nationally-socialized medicine “legal,” or, more probably, a majority of the justices will declare that some or all of the law is “unconstitutional.”
This is all just so much religious theater, like the breathless anticipation of the announcmeent of a new pope. The United States Constitution is the devoutly-worshipped charter of a criminal cartel, and we imbue these matters with a sacramental holiness in order to avoid admitting that we are all of us serfs engaged in our own gradual self-enslavement. The question at bar is this: Is the process to run a little more quickly or at a slower pace? It doesn’t really matter, since the terminal destination — a police state — is the same either way.
This is the reality of the 1789 Constitution, quoting from Man Alive!:
For your whole life you have been told — and you have probably believed — that the United States Constitution is a grand and noble document that exists to safeguard your liberty. In reality, it is a sort of peace-treaty drafted by three corrupt political factions in early America. The owners of the newly-erected factories in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states wanted to impose high tariffs on goods manufactured in England, thus to make their much-shoddier products more appealing to American buyers. Planters in the Southern states wanted legal protection for and official sanction of the despicable practice of human slavery. And poor ordinary people wanted “free” land, to be expropriated by the U.S. Army from the Native Americans who had occupied it thereto. The liberty-loving revolution of 1776 was contorted into a rent-seeking coup d’état by 1789, and the whole wretched abomination was rationalized in The Federalist Papers — which you very probably pretended to read in high school or college.
The constitutional language that will matter most in the ObamaCare decision is the “commerce clause,” the source of most of the federal government’s abuses against human liberty:
[Congress shall have the power] “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”
Without that one line, there would not have been a new constitution in 1789. The process was driven by the merchant class, led by Alexander Hamilton. They wanted to impose punitive tariffs on foreign goods while preventing individual states from imposing punitive tariffs on each other. The 1789 Constitution was a rent-seeking document from the outset, and the commerce clause has been used to justify and legitimate every rent-seeking crime committed under the color of law ever since.
So are Hamilton and his mercantilist — that is to say, Rotarian Socialist — claque responsible for our current forced march into slavery? No. When they used the word “regulate,” the Hamiltonians meant regulation of flow, as a faucet regulates the flow of water. They did not mean the kind of micro-management the federal government has since undertaken. When you can’t afford to purchase imported cane sugar and must instead buy domestic sugar made from beets, blame Hamilton. When you are threatened with prison time for telling the truth about the health benefits of red wine, the villain is not Hamilton and not Congress but the Supreme Court, which has stretched the original criminal intent of the word “regulate” out of all recognition.
If you were paying attention in the twentieth century, you know what happens to ordinary people when government gets big enough: Folks who can tolerate being pushed around all day every day live as slaves and those who cannot are slaughtered by the millions. There are no exceptions to this pattern, and ObamaCare is simply the next step in the process of sorting the slaves from the damned: You will either become a welfare client de facto or an outlaw de jure.
Patrick Henry — who opposed the 1789 Constitution — famously said, “Give me liberty or give me death!” We are safe to recall this because it happened a long time ago. People who say things like that now end up on Homeland Security “watch” lists. In a few years, they will be imprisoned — if they are not killed outright.
The Supreme Court cannot save us from that fate, alas. They can’t overturn the 1789 Constitution. More importantly, they can’t cause the American people to reverse direction, to turn away from this mindless march to self-enslavement. But there is one thing they could do tomorrow that would make a big difference now — and possibly save millions of innocent lives in the long run:
They could return to Hamilton’s understanding of the word “regulate,” reversing two centuries’ of decisions that have grown a relatively harmless rent-seeking criminal cartel into an incipient police state.
A week from today is Independence Day, the celebration of the rebellion of American patriots in 1776 against a government that was minuscule compared to the one we suffer under today, and was very small, even, compared to the state many of those same Americans inflicted upon themselves in 1789. The Supreme Court cannot cause modern-day Americans to reclaim and to jealously guard the liberty we have squandered since then. But it can at least undo the damage to our freedoms the court itself has done.
