We're Not France, Yet

The Wall Street Journal ^ | March 29, 2012

[MinorityRepublican]

Maybe the United States dodged a bullet this week. Make that a deep-penetration bunker buster into the original idea of America. On Tuesday, the justices of the Supreme Court sounded, on balance, to be disposed against affirming the Obama health-care law's mandate.

The Obama administration's lawyers argued that the mandate to purchase health insurance is a routine extension of the Commerce Clause, which in the 1930s became the most potent sentence in the U.S. Constitution. It is not a certainty that Tuesday's discussion of the ObamaCare mandate means it will be overturned. It's still worth thinking about the implications if the court affirms the law's individual mandate.

Should that happen in June, two things would follow: The Commerce Clause's authority would be unfettered. Big as that is, the implication of an unfettered Commerce Clause is larger: That will be the day the United States becomes France.

Like the U.S., France also had "liberté" in the short version of its founding idea. Democracies always begin in liberty, but they don't always keep it. France is in economic decline today because the structure of its government is so severely centralized. An anecdote describes what eventually such centralization does to national hope.

A story in the New York Times a few weeks ago reported on two small towns on the border between France and Germany. French Sélestat, in Alsace, has an unemployment rate of 8% and a youth unemployment rate of 23%. Across the border in Emmendingen, the rates are 3% and 7%. (The U.S.'s own unemployment rates these days are closer to those in Sélestat.)

[MinorityRepublican]

[freedomfiter2]

I believe it’s called the interstate commerce clause.

[Navy Patriot]

It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.