American Kulaks (Wickard v. Filburn)

Ricochet ^ | 10Aug2010 | James Lileks

[astyanax]

My friend the Crazy Uke is a mortgage guy; he’s getting me another refi. Years ago - oh, decades - we sat up all night in the back booth of a college restaurant and argued politics; now we sit around the kitchen table of the house he helped us buy, sign endless forms and documents, then pour a drink and agree about politics. I changed. He didn’t. As the son of Ukrainian DPs, he had anti-Soviet and anti-statist ideas poured into his marrow as he grew up, and his accounts of his parents’ lives during the famine and the war were not inconsiderable elements in my political education. It’s one thing to have a college bull session about the Cold War; it’s another to argue with a guy who was actually detained by the KGB and kicked out of the Eastern Bloc.

The Ukrainian famine is one of those episodes known more to anti-commies, I suspect; if I’m right about that, it says something about the people who regard such episodes as inconvenient anomalies and insist we talk about smallpox-infested blankets.

[astyanax]

I find it amazing that the administration is going to justify Obamacare by citing a case that is almost universally despised.
In their lawsuit, Florida and other states say: “Congress is attempting to regulate and penalize Americans for choosing not to engage in economic activity. If Congress can do this much, there will be virtually no sphere of private decision-making beyond the reach of federal power.”

In reply, the administration and its allies say that a person who goes without insurance is simply choosing to pay for health care out of pocket at a later date. In the aggregate, they say, these decisions have a substantial effect on the interstate market for health care and health insurance.

In its legal briefs, the Obama administration points to a famous New Deal case, Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court upheld a penalty imposed on an Ohio farmer who had grown a small amount of wheat, in excess of his production quota, purely for his own use.

[Paladin2]

"...the Supreme Court upheld a penalty imposed on an Ohio farmer who had grown a small amount of wheat, in excess of his production quota, purely for his own use."

That case law clearly needs to be overturned as soon as possible and reparations paid to all conservatives.

[astyanax]

This would be the perfect opportunity for the Supreme Court to remove the “catch all” from this ruling and its impact on the commerce clause.

[DrC]

“who had grown a small amount of wheat, in excess of his production quota, purely for his own use.”

Weren’t people in the Soviet Union sent to the Gulag for offences such as this? This really epitomizes the totalitarian mentality. It’s not enough to regulate every iota of goods that are exchanged with others: the state has to criminalize growing food for one’s own family or self.

It’s hard to imagine the Founding Fathers risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to create a government with this kind of power to squelch freedom.

[Paladin2]

That “decision” is clearly an affront to personal liberty and property rights.

[tired1]

Ironically, Soviet farmers were allowed to sell to the State that which was produced on their “private plots”.