We Watch As The Berlin Wall Falls

Jun 29, 2012 | by Laz A. Mataz

[Lazamataz]

I have always wondered how it felt to be a committed Communist in the former Soviet Union, when the system collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell.

Now I know. 

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States of America tore up the social contract between America and her citizens. They concluded that it was legal and Constitutional to force a citizen to buy a government-sanctioned product or service.

This flies squarely in the face of everything it is to be a free citizen, and totally upends the concept of free markets. Armed with this ruling, the government may now decree that every citizen purchase a particular car, a particular item of clothing.... or, harkening back to the 1930's German experience, a particular book (Of course, even Hitler saw that it would be unreasonable to force people to buy his book, so he gave them for free to newlyweds and soldiers at the front).

Forced commerce, that is what it may reasonably be called. In what way does this differ from Central Planning, the famously failed Soviet model?

Many pundits have noted that this will likely hurt Obama and his minions in Congress and the Senate in November. While this is possibly true, does it matter? Does it change the fact that the Supreme Court has drastically altered the social contract between America's government and her people? Party control waxes. Party control wanes. But SCOTUS rulings take decades to reverse, on the rare occasions they are reversed at all. All it takes is one bad election, and the government can now decree we must own certain products and services.

We will see all sorts of freedom-limiting compelled purchases. Obviously, each person needs burial insurance, right? And liability insurance on a personal level, this is reasonable, isn't it? After all, suppose you accidently harm someone? And OF COURSE, each person who wishes to post their opinion on the internet... they will clearly need 'slander and libel' insurance, in case they should speak ill of another. All these 'insurances' are intended as new taxes, only, and in the last case, shall be created to expressly restrict free speech.

In light of this ruling, perhaps the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty needs to be updated:

  

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe in a specifically decreed manner by an all-powerful Federal government,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the door that is mandated that every citizen own (c.f., 2013's HR 5695, the Congressional Golden Door Possession Act)!"  

I asked at the beginning of this editorial, what it must have felt like, as a committed Communist, to see the Soviet Union fall. Well, now I know, for I -- someone committed to freedom and the American ideal embodied in the Constitution -- watched America begin the final leg of it's fall on June 28, 2012, at 10:00AM Eastern Standard Time.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[RichInOC]

I know this isn’t strictly on topic, but I have to ask. Had you been in Berlin in November ‘89, and you saw guys headed for the Wall with sledgehammers...would you have hit it?

[Madame Dufarge]

Wasn't the whole purpose of lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court to wall the justices off from political pressure?

I've always thought the concept was a utopian fiction and Roberts' odious decision proves it.

[Steve0113]

Please add me to your ping list. I have admired your writing, in all of its forms, for many years.

[Lazamataz]

I will do so, sir, and thank you for your kind words!