The Rotten Basis of Obamacare.

On August 18th 1787, at the Federal Convention, an Enumerated Power was motioned for addition to our Constitution. That was,

“To establish public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the promotion of agriculture, commerce, trades and manufactures.”

Say what? Oh yes. Any Freeper knows this did not make its way into Article I Section 8. Instead, the delegates approved the familiar Commerce Clause, “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with Indian Tribes.” Direct government involvement in “Promotion of commerce,” was rejected for regulation of commerce. Big difference, eh?

Well, apparently not to FDR’s court some seventy years ago. Under the quiet commerce clause they and subsequent courts blew up limited government. By this, our blackrobes granted Congressional power to regulate any and all economic activity. Statist government could dictate crop subsidies, workplace employment standards, . . . and now, our very lives.

The discarded clause would have opened the door into every corner of our lives, certainly to the extent that Congress could have regulated anything that affected interstate commerce as cited in the laughable and disastrous Wickard v. Filburn decision.

The rejected power would have made Wickard v. Filburn not only unnecessary, but not even thought of, for the national government would have been long involved in every aspect of our lives. The fact of its rejection IMO is further proof that our Framers specifically rejected what FDR’s Supreme Court found lurking somewhere in a crease of our Constitution in 1942.

Wickard supplied that which the Framers discarded but the Left demanded. It was their Philosopher’s Stone. Take a Constitution of limited powers and render it into a Marxist tool of oppression. Unabashedly Leftist contortions of the Commerce clause collectively since the 1930s fail to pass the giggle test.

I am certain our Constitution ultimately means what it says and not what the judicial blackrobes say it means. By like construction, the blackrobes cannot legitimately force on us an enumerated power specifically rejected by our Framers. Wickard and all subsequent rot leading to the final elimination of liberty under the Obamacare Enabling Act have no basis whatsoever in our beloved Constitution. But you already knew that.

Good find; I'd forgotten about it. Thank you.

The key to ridding ourselves of Wickard is to show the court why it is totally unnecessary in order to meet the "regulatory needs" (health, safety, environmental protection, etc.) they perceive that the society at large has supposedly demanded of the Federal government. Not only were these powers to be retained by the States, but the actual needs themselves are replaceable by a vibrant market in risk-management.

What we have effectively done with regulation is to have nationalized the insurance industry in the name of protecting its investors from out-of-control tort law. The problem is that manipulating such powers then become playthings for politicians and empires for bureaucrats all feeding a corrupt corporate/foundation machine. The reality of Wickard has finally come home to roost.

The problem of corporate scale that Rhenquist was citing was a direct outgrowth of the perfidy in drafting the 14th Amendment, for which the Court itself was complicit in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific, as discussed here.

That power was expanded yet farther in the use of treaties held at the UN to internationalize regulation, abetting corporate scale yet farther. Yet there is no doubt that the agenda to internationalize our laws was in place before the ink was dry on the Constitution itself, as discussed here.

The result has been a corrupt corporate racket in regulation as discussed here and here. The fix is to understand that regulatory functions are actually a form of risk management. Effectively, nearly every function of regulatory government can be replaced by correctly designed markets with particular focus upon automating transaction costs, contract negotiations, and reining in tort, as discussed here.

Yeah, I know, I'm flogging my own work. :-) I just wanted to point out that both the problem and the fixes have been there all along and that the agency has been claque of Masonic bankers' hatchet-men in black robes. Marxists, corporate fascists, they're all the same. Some are more equal than others.

Yeah, I feel your pain and there is certainly no power or need, Constitutional or otherwise, for the feds to be so involved in health, safety, . . . etc.

At the Constitutional Convention, Roger Sherman twice submitted a clause that reserved the police power to the States, “that no State shall without its consent be affected in its internal police, or deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.” The last clause made the Constitution, but alas, not the first. It is a shame his police power clause did not make the cut, maybe it would have made a difference, but then again, the Left are expert at twisting plain language to their purpose, like the innocuous commerce clause.

Wickard is constitutional fantasy. Until Scotus is willing to pitch 80 years of rot, to scrape off the many layers of flawed judicial scabs atop our Constitution, we are screwed.

Yeah, I feel your pain...

Actually, I don't think you can. Long ago realizing that I needed standing by which to bring a case against the environmental regulation monster, I patented the first such free-market business method. Still, I lacked acknowledgement for technical expertise. So I've spent the last ten years, much of it on our hands and knees, restoring our land to a level of purity in native plant habitat never before achieved by the bureaucrats. We're there.

I'm just starting to get that acknowledgement at least verbally, but what do you know who is in charge of controlling whether or not I get to publish my results but the very State bureaucrats, NGO flunkies, and grant-hustling academics dependent upon the system. I'll beat them eventually, because I've got what they know very well they could never do. It's too much work.

As an adjunct to that work was learning a perspective that, together with my background in product development and manufacturing in both the military and medical device business, rendered me uniquely qualified to discover a long lost Biblical paradigm, one that transforms our understanding of the Bible. I know, it sounds weird, but it's true. They key to Israel's national survival was the Sabbath for the Land. How it was supposed to work was long lost and remains undiscovered to Biblical scholarship.

OK, so as to "frustration," try telling Christians and Jews that the Mosaic Law mandates that they be prepared to release and abandon their land for one year out of seven to be left to be managed by the poor. Try telling them that it was the key element in a system of national civil defense based upon a militia trained in guerilla warfare. Try telling them that the system explains much of what seems metaphorical in the New Testament, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. Try telling them that the Cain and Abel story is a metaphorical teaching on how agro-urban civilization destroyed its pastoral progenitors by assimilation (not by conflict), and that it predicts the temporality of every agro-urban civilization thereafter.

The Sabbath for the Land was the foundation of a remarkable system of national defense and social welfare that has never been fully understood, until now.

OK so here's the frustration: You've got this amazing system in which people supposedly already believe... all you have to do is explain it to them. Yet once they start to realize that it's true, they won't read it any further. Just like ancient Israel before the exile, they just don't want to DO it.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.