Agree with you on this but the mandate to buy health insurance is not a tax. And if I then had to pay a penalty, confiscating my money would not be the same as taking it for public use. It would be unreasonable seizure.
My point was that they can take your income, but they can only use it for public use. They cannot constitutionally redistribute wealth to private parties.
Social security was deemed an income tax, so the SCOTUS ruled it was constitutional. But social security is clearly unconstitutional in that giving checks to people is not a public use. A social security check is not the same thing as a road, a school, or paying someone for services rendered. Again, if public use is distorted to mean public purpose, then government can literally take ALL of your income and hand it out any way they deem fit.
I do understand your point that this is a mandate to buy something which is not the same thing as an income tax. Yeah, that’s unconstitutional, too. Yet if we allow them to also distort public use, then a single payer system would be entirely constitutional. They could simply tax everyone (on a progressive scale, of course) and mandate single-payer health care. Social security is on a smaller scale, but the constitutional distortion that permits it would also permit single payer health care, because they have the right to take income in any amount and use it for anything that’s a public “purpose.”