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Politics : View from the Center and Left

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To: Paul Smith who wrote (152192)	12/13/2010 3:48:20 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) of 541685

The case against the individual mandate is that the government does not have the power in the Constitution to force a citizen to buy anything. Why not force citizens to buy GM cars so that union jobs are saved? Why not force citizens to buy healthier food? Why not force citizens to buy treasury bonds? Since you don't seem interested in the back and forth exchange of conversation, I assume the point of this post was simply to lay a marker. So my reply is not meant for you but to lay a counter marker. The point is wrong. The government has all sorts of individual mandates as I see others point out further down the thread. I suspect the most comparable is social security, in which citizens are "forced" to purchase some old age insurance. But taxes, medicare payments, seat belts for cars, the list could simply go on forever. The point Ezra Klein makes is the telling one, however. The individual mandate was a favorite notion of Republicans over against the notion of a single payer system. But once it's put forward by the Dems, given the wrongheadedness of this incarnation of the Republican party, it becomes something that is so bad it's unconstitutional. Warped thinking. In the extreme.

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