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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (135798)	4/2/2010 10:02:08 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 543013

but that fact alone doesn't invalidate the argument in favor of government mandates for health insurance No the constitution and other considerations do that. The state requirements to buy insurance to register a car are sometimes raised as an argument to counter the claim that the mandate is unconstitutional, but they are in fact irrelevant to the issue for the multiple reasons I laid out in my earlier posts. The laying out of those reasons, was not taking the conversation "to a silly place". If anything was it was the posting of the faulty argument in the first place, but I don't think I'd call that silly either, just wrong. In any case once the argument is made, refuting it is an important part of the conversation, not a "silly" part. I believe that the mandate would fall under the "provide for the general welfare" concept of governmental responsibility. The general welfare clause is not a "the government can do whatever it wants if it makes a plausible claim that it would improve the general welfare" (if it was I'd dispute the plausibility, but practically such a clause would be close to a "congress shall have the power to do whatever the hell it wants" clause). Its limited to government taxing and spending. In fact its part of what's generally called the "Taxing and Spending Clause". This would be an argument for government single payer programs being constitutional (not that I think it would actually help the general welfare, but pretty much it just has to be that the claim is ridiculous on its face, since the courts shouldn't be, and mostly don't want to be, the arbiter of what is good practical policy). The government could tax and spend to provide insurance coverage, but that doesn't cover it forcing people to buy insurance from private vendors. The clause serves not to expand government power but to limit it, in that in insists that the spending be for the general welfare. But in practice it would take a really extreme case of obvious lack of even a pretense of supporting the general welfare for any court to even consider striking down a federal law based on this limitation.