Obamacare Unconstitutional

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was just ruled unconstitutional.

The centerpiece of Obamacare is the individual mandate. For those who've been ignoring the news for a while, basically you are compelled by government to purchase health care, and if you opt out, you face fines. Unpaid fines to the government don't result in the government going "shucks, we didn't really mean it", they result in jail time. Try it this year with the IRS.

They give you free health care in there, too.

J.B.H. wrote about the unconstitutionality of Obamacare a while back.

Jake Tapper from ABC asked Obama about the fine system and the president admitted he agreed fines for noncompliance were necessary.

And there are jail time penalties in the bill:

“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…”

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.”

But for now, a judge has ruled against Obamacare and the "buy it or go to jail" mandate - and invalidating the entire bill. Next step is the government going to the supreme court to push for it again.

Ultimately, the question is one of the scope of federal power and the ability for the government to stretch the commerce clause to encompass any absurd suppression of citizens' rights.

This started in no small part under one of the last giant progressive presidents, FDR. Wickard v. Filburn. Filburn was a farmer who was growing extra wheat for himself to feed his livestock. The government had mandated the amount of wheat that could be grown in order to drive up the price of wheat and "help" farmers.

To begin with, it's Keynesian economics, which are predicated on meddling by a bureaucrat who believes they know more than the person on the ground - and the bureaucrat ultimately using the government's gun against the American person who rejects them. The price was low and that "hurt" farmers. But rather than support farmers growing as much wheat as possible by offering tax cuts for farmers or something - leading to more wheat and fewer hungry people, the government decided to limit the amount of wheat. Supply goes down, demand goes up. Of course, limiting the amount of food results in famines... but the bureaucrat in DC doesn't feel it.

The fedgov is hurting people in California's Central Valley right now. This time, rather than favor the price of wheat over farmers, they favor a fish over farmers.

The EPA hates Americans of Mexican descent. Obama hates brown people!

Anyhow, Filburn was growing wheat for himself, and the government (FDR's supreme court), ruled that the government could regulate crops grown for private use, as they "influence the market". The idea was that since Filburn wasn't buying wheat at government-inflated prices, he could also not use his own land to grow wheat to feed his own livestock, as his act of not buying wheat influenced the price somewhere, no matter how miniscule.

Since he used his own land to grow his own wheat and not buy government wheat he was influencing the price of wheat by taking out his buying power. It's like the government looking at the hooligan in the Broken Window Fallacy and going "we should smash some more windows!"

Filburn's right to his own property and his own enterprise on his own land were violated. The government ruled that through the Commerce Clause that it could tell you what to do with your own assets. This is what Obamacare was doing until it was ruled invalid - except now rather than just growing your own wheat, Obamacare took it one step further. If you didn't spend your money, you were subject to penalties.

The Commerce Clause is thus:
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes

What does this mean? According to SCOTUS in Gonzales V Raich, which illegalized home-grown marijuana:
The Commerce Clause emerged as the Framers' response to the central problem giving rise to the Constitution itself: the absence of any federal commerce power under the Articles of Confederation. For the first century of our history, the primary use of the Clause was to preclude the kind of discriminatory state legislation that had once been permissible. Then, in response to rapid industrial development and an increasingly interdependent national economy, Congress “ushered in a new era of federal regulation under the commerce power,” beginning with the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

What's it really mean?
It was set up so that trading between states would be regular. So that if someone in Vermont wanted to sell something in Maine, they didn't have to pay tariffs to cross New Hampshire. That's about it. It was to keep Kansas from telling flights across the state they have to stop selling drinks at the state line. That was the purpose.

The purpose was not to tell a farmer that if he grew wheat for himself he'd go to jail, or to tell you that when you work for your money, you have to buy a healthcare plan or go to jail.

For those who would contend that not being a lawyer means that you, Joe, Jane, Pedro, Shaniqua or Vinh don't have a voice, that's nonsense. The Constitution was not written in some esoteric language. It's pretty plain even now.

You don't get from this:
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes

To this:
“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…”

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.”

Without a hefty load of BS between them. If you don't spend you money the way the govt says, you got to jail. Nonsense.

More Eco-Daleks

Every time you drive your SUV, Manbearpig kills a little girl.

Via Hotair.

More here.

While this is plainly misanthropic, and clearly falls into the usual eco-dalek theme, is it really a surprise?

Of course, Manbearpig is all about people who are made to feel guilty by buying into this bullshit being convinced to buy carbon indulgences to make the prophets and bishops of global warming/climate change rich while making them feel good. It's all about redistributing wealth from the global rich to the global poor because the "overconsumption" of the global rich is killing the global poor.

Global rich here ends up meaning the lower, middle, and upper class of the West (not the upper-upper class, though) having to sacrifice the wealth and prosperity they've created and enjoy - from high-calorie, low cost foods that make it so the US is one of the few nations where poor people are fat (unlike the rest of the world throughout history). Global poor here means the dictators who go along with the scheme and keep convincing the anthropogenic global warming useful idiots to give them money. The dictators will keep their people poor while blaming the rest of the world for their woes, because without the scapegoat, the people would overthrow the dictator and get freedom or at least a less-bad dictator for themselves.

Note the careful choice of the Manbearpig cultists' choice of victim. They cry about how the third world is suffering because you drive an SUV and have kids who need to eat - and often point to the suffering in Africa. (Why is Africa suffering? Dictators and Western aid propping up dictators regimes... but I digress.) Why is the child not a dusky-colored urchin from the third world? Because that'd be rightfully viewed as horrifically racist and most importantly misanthropic.

So why is it a western-looking white child? Kids of the globally "priviledged" probably won't suffer from the effects of you driving an SUV - in fact they'll benefit from the quality of life improved by having a car to get them to soccer practice rather than being told to walk across town (and because Manbearpig is bullshit).

The point is to elicit an emotional response. Terrorizing children is their MO, as we saw with 10:10. This white western girl is clearly a beneficiary of the destruction wreaked by Manbearpig (in the eco-dalek ideology), so terrorizing her is a righteous act. She also represents the offspring of the target audience - Westerners who will abandon their reason in order to abandon the lives that they've built in order to give it to Manbearpig cultists who've done nothing but peddle an ideology.

It also belies a fundamental disconnect from what makes one group of people prosperous and another not so prosperous. Often the weaker nation is still developing - and needs a market to sell products to - the greater nation. Often the weaker nation is weaker because its development is stymied by its own self-destructive dictators/government. The leftist Manbearpig cultists and ecodaleks don't understand this. They can't understand this due to their ideology. They also can't understand that environmental stewardship is usually a luxury afforded to those who are wealthy. But I'm digressing...

---

Aside from being a visual agitation meant to say "do this or we'll kill your kids", it's also kinda funny. Perhaps because it's almost to the point of self parody, and looks a lot like this internet meme:

Eco-Daleks

I'm coining a new term today:
ECO-DALEK.

For those unfamiliar with Dr. Who, a Dalek is one of these:
Wikipedia entry here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalek

They're slow-moving, nigh-invulnerable aliens with one goal. To EXTERMINATE pretty much everything that isn't them. (They're also low-budget monsters with plungers for death rays, but they've got cultural staying power and some good story arcs.)

So what exactly is an Eco-Dalek? An environmentalist-ecoterrorist that believes in extermination of mankind for the sake of the planet.

(Alternately, they can be Enviro-Daleks.)

The bad guys in Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6 novel were representative of that. Obama's Science & Technology Czar, John Holdren, holds this view. He believes in forced abortions and mass sterilization by poisoning drinking water to exterminate the population in order to "save the planet". The concept of overpopulation by people overpopulation and consumption overpopulation also results in this view - where if there are too many poor, or rich who use too many resources, they must be exterminated.

In fact, most Malthusians think this way. Some educated idiots simply compare humans to bacteria while their projected malthusian catastrophes never happen. They know what's best for the planet, and the planet is the most important thing. So humanity has to start dying.

Of course, they believe that they are the chosen ones who should live since they're the best stewards of the land and know how to preserve and protect the planet. Everyone else must die, they must live, since they are perfect. It almost parallels Marxist doctrine of class enemies, but here the class enemies are based on piety to adherence to the doctrines of environmental mania and their leaders whether through advancement of the AGW cause or at least buying carbon indulgences. This is why Al Gore, with a mansion and jetsetting around the world as the prophet of Manbearpig, can be an absolute hypocrite (though he buys carbon credits from his own company). Al Gore, while he is the prophet of Manbearpig, doesn't seem to be an eco-dalek yet. He hasn't actually said "you should die". (Yet.)

Al Gore's brand is more of an enviro-statist. He's all for the government regulating your life until you're a subsistence farmer who doesn't harm the earth at all, or until you're simply hooked up to pods like in Matrix and fed bonemeal slurry Soylent Green from dead people so we don't even have to farm anymore.

This is his world:


A world where you submit to the eco-state. The state, of course, does whatever it likes. And of course, those who consume more are evil, those who consume less are good, so it's also a bit of watermelon environmentalism. Green on the outside, red on the inside. A dictatorial authoritiarian government will rule your life, for your own good. Alternately: Enviro-nazis.

The eco-dalek is something else.

Consider the following ad from the land that brought you 1984, Dr. Who and blood pudding:



This is a real ad. No, this is not a spoof by the Onion.

The UK Guardian has part of the story here. It's part of the 10:10 project, telling people they must reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010.

Hotair has a good roundup of critical responses here.

You don't do what they "nudge", then they will EXTERMINATE!

For your own good, of course.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.

- C.S. Lewis

Al Gore merely wants to tell you how to live for your own good. He'll dictate how your life shall be, and you'll live as he tells you to. The eco-dalek tells you you should not live. He'll dictate that you must die for your own good.

EXTERMINATE!
EXTERMINATE!
EXTERMINATE!

Progressives Against Progress

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_3_american-liberalism.html

Progressives Against Progress
The rise of environmentalism poisoned liberals’ historical optimism.
by Fred Siegel

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility. Regarding human nature as essentially both beneficent and malleable, liberals, like their socialist cousins, argued that with the aid of science and given the proper social and economic conditions, humanity could free itself from its cramped carapace of greed and distrust and enter a realm of true freedom and happiness. Conservatives, by contrast, clung to a tragic sense of man’s inherent limitations. While acknowledging the benefits of science, they argued that it could never fundamentally reform, let alone transcend, the human condition. Most problems don’t have a solution, the conservatives maintained; rather than attempting Promethean feats, man would do best to find a balanced place in the world.
...
American liberalism has remarkably come to resemble nineteenth-century British Tory Radicalism, an aristocratic sensibility that combined strong support for centralized monarchical power with a paternalistic concern for the poor. Its enemies were the middle classes and the aesthetic ugliness it associated with an industrial economy powered by bourgeois energies.
...
Like the Tory Radicals, today’s liberal gentry see the untamed middle classes as the true enemy. “Environmentalism offered the extraordinary opportunity to combine the qualities of virtue and selfishness,” wrote William Tucker in a groundbreaking 1977 Harper’s article on the opposition to construction of the Storm King power plant along New York’s Hudson River. Tucker described the extraordinary sight of a fleet of yachts—including one piloted by the old Stalinist singer Pete Seeger—sailing up and down the Hudson in protest. What Tucker tellingly described as the environmentalists’ “aristocratic” vision called for a stratified, terraced society in which the knowing ones would order society for the rest of us. Touring American campuses in the mid-1970s, Norman Macrae of The Economist was shocked “to hear so many supposedly left-wing young Americans who still thought they were expressing an entirely new and progressive philosophy as they mouthed the same prejudices as Trollope’s 19th century Tory squires: attacking any further expansion of industry and commerce as impossibly vulgar, because ecologically unfair to their pheasants and wild ducks.”

Neither the failure of the environmental apocalypse to arrive nor the steady improvement in environmental conditions over the last 40 years has dampened the ardor of those eager to make hair shirts for others to wear. The call for political coercion as a path back to Ruskin’s and Mishan’s small-is-beautiful world is still with us. Radical environmentalists’ Tory disdain for democracy and for the habits of their inferiors remains undiminished. True to its late-1960s origins, political environmentalism in America gravitates toward both bureaucrats and hippies: toward a global, big-brother government that will keep the middle classes in line and toward a back-to-the-earth, peasantlike localism, imposed on others but presenting no threat to the elites’ comfortable lives. How ironic that these gentry liberals—progressives against progress—turn out to resemble nothing so much as nineteenth-century conservatives.

More at City Journal.

This article interested me since it points out the leftist ruling class' environmental statist ideology. Written by a leaning-lefty, he seems somewhat dismayed by the constant push for statist rule by "liberals". This ideology quickly summed up:
1. Nature is god (whether the left believes it or it's just to get to #4 is up to the individual lefty)
2. The masses ruin nature
3. Therefore masses must be controlled (or exterminated)
4. The leaders know best and are exempt from rules for the masses

Fred Siegel's politics seem to lean left (without doing too much research into the guy), and this is shown in his ending statement.

19th Century British "conservatives" are not the same as US conservatives. Look at the top of the blog here. See where it says " helping to conserve American libertarian values"? That's US conservatism.

Conservatism within the US is often viewed as traditionalism - which is associated with religious and family groups, and while often laudible in their non-governmental efforts, conservatism is adherence to the Constitution and adherence to those principles of the Constitution. It's a document of classic liberalism - as in liberty for all, tolerance for all, and the ability for each man (and woman) to live his live how he chooses free of all but the fewest govt. restrictions.

The US is a nation of free men who came together to establish a nation of free men. They took pride in their traditions, but did not want to impose on one another. The most unifying tradition is that of a reverence for freedom.

Conservatism - as in conservation of one's original values - in other nations is a different animal. Conservatism in England may represent groups like the British National Party, which has a very pro-Anglo/pro-white/anti-everybody-who's-not-a-white-Brit bias to them. They are conserving old values of the UK, just values that are rooted in nationalism and white British ethnic supremacy.

Until a 2009 court order, they restricted their membership to "indigenous caucasian". Presumably to keep any smart-ass Chechens from joining just to fuck with them.

Conservatism in Japan may represent hard nationalist policies that are very pro-Japanese and frequently anti-Korean, anti-Chinese. Conservatism in France or Iran may represent laws that preserve the language against any change or modification, or variations against traditional morality of those nations.

Pictured: elastic loaves.

The United States, unlike most nations in the world, is a collection of different ethnic groups. The US is not represented by one cardinal national group. There is no "American" ethnicity. There is a group of people who are irish, a group who are german, a group who are russian, congolese, brazilian, mexican, japanese, chinese, etc. There is no ethnicity nor ethnic culture to match the United States.

Thus Siegel makes a big mistake in assuming that this leftist enviro-statism has anything to do with actual conservatism. The difference between British monarchists in the 19th century and American conservatives is vast. The left, which are emphatically illiberal and intolerant, despite their nom de jour "liberal", are far from American conservatism. That they may want to conserve monarchical dictatorial rule is not a surprise to those who've seen the effects of disagreeing with a "liberal." (Liberal-on-liberal violence, especially.)

That some use environmentalism and some use ethnic supremacy are simply different means to the same end: power. Some are naked in their power grab based on what they perceive as an ethnic right, some grab for power by determining that they alone can save the world from an environmental apocalypse - and that all others be damned. Neither is remotely like American conservatism. Both are statism, autocracy, and dictatorship.

American conservatism is entrenched in these words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,...