What Roberts actually did was pull a sophoric rhetorical prank, committing a "semantic fallacy," arguing about, not what it means and what it does, but what we call it. Having called something a tax, when it is not a tax, he then further distorted what constitutes a permissible tax.
In my view Roberts grade shool diplomma should be revoked. His antics are of a kind that only a statist could pull, left wing or right wing does not really matter.
a/k/a as we call it in the practice of law ... “legal fiction”