Obama's Authoritarian, Unconstitutional Health Care Proposal

The American Thinker ^ | September 10, 2009 | Mark J. Fitzgibbons

[Scanian]

In his September 9 address to Congress and the nation on health insurance, President Obama said that under his plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance.

There is no clause in Article I of the Constitution authorizing Congress to craft legislation forcing individuals to purchase insurance.

Mr. Obama attempted to justify his intended federal intrusion on individual liberty by noting that states require drivers to carry auto insurance. Notwithstanding the difference between a requirement imposed on licensed individuals or machines as opposed to a mandate for everyone, he fails to recognize the distinction between federal and state powers.

[aruanan]

I'll quote myself again. This is a piece of something I wrote for a graduate class in human nutrition back in the mid-1990s. The teacher called it cynical:

Some health professionals seem to believe that the government should sponsor their efforts to counter the self-interested efforts of others (nutrition and diet quacks for example) because they are right and the others are wrong, because they are altruistic and the others are not. It may be true that they are factually correct and genuinely altruistic, and that what they wish to do will have a beneficial effect on many people, but it doesn’t follow necessarily that the government should fund them.

This is a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon brought about by the advent of the secularized state. Instead of viewing the state as a limited means to a limited end, the tendency has been to imbue it, a temporal entity, with the attributes of a transcendent final judgment in which all injustices and inequalities are finally rectified. In this way, the secular state has been categorically, though not personally, deified and expected to act accordingly (something of a diffuse divine right of kings).

This is seen in those who believe the necessary response to a social ill is the passage of a law, especially a federal law, and the enactment of a program, especially one that they can devise and administrate (and that not necessarily for cynical reasons). Those who feel they are on the side of right, certain they aren’t acting against society’s interest, often appeal to the State to aid them in their struggle against evil. Since the πνευμα of the secular state is money and power, they ask to be endowed accordingly. It’s pathetically naive and dangerous.