Blog

Very worthwhile Ann Althouse Post on the constitutionality of mandating people buy health care. (H/T Instapundit)

While Raich allowed Congress to regulate market activity, what about market inactivity;  that is, a person NOT buying health care:

Moreover, the Commerce Clause question is quite a bit more complicated that Dean Chemerinsky makes it sound. The marijuana growers were engaging in an activity — making a product for which there is a big, regulated market. In this new case, we’d have Congress regulating people for their inaction. What other case is like that? Congress can “regulate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce”? Where’s the activity? It’s inactivity! And Supreme Court cases have limited Congress’s power where the activity in question is noncommercial. Isn’t the failure to buy insurance noncommercial?

People frequently equate health care mandates to car insurance mandates. That is, almost every state requires a person to buy auto insurance, or pay into some uninsured motorists fund. David Savage does so in this LA Times Op-ED.

But, the pivotal difference is that the states are requiring this, and not the federal government. Contrary to the protestations of many, the states have a general police power. The federal government doesn’t. While the states routinely make people do stuff, the federal government cannot compel people to do stuff.

As Roger Pilon puts, it “What next? Can Congress order you to buy spinach?”

Though, the feds frequently compel business to do stuff, but that’s a discussion for another day. When I raise this argument to most, I get glazed eyes. I’m glad Althouse is bringing this point to the mainstream.

See my previous coverage of Obamacare here, here, here, and here.

I just received copies of two Ayn Rand biographies released on the same day. Goddess of the Market, Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns, and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller.

For purposes of full disclosure to the Obama FTC, I paid for the Burns book, but I received a complimentary copy of the Heller book. The perks of JoshBlogs 🙂

An interview with Anne Heller will be forthcoming.

I look forward to reading both of these fascinating books about a curious and enigmatic, yet massively influential figure in thought.

From Reason:

Coming November 2, Reason.tv will debut “Radicals for Capitalism: Celebrating the Enduring Power of Ayn Rand’s Ideas,” a new video series featuring segments on the novelist’s continuing presence in American culture and exclusive interviews with Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, Reason Foundation founder Robert W. Poole, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), and many others.

This looks like a pretty cool special. Stay tuned.

Fascinating 88-minute speech given by Milton Friedman to the  University of Chicago Hillel in 1978. Definitely worth a listen.

“There are few peoples, if any in the world, who owe so great a debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism as the Jews,” and “There are few peoples, if any in the world, who have done so much to undermine the intellectual foundations of capitalism as the Jews.”

I’ve wondered about this conundrum for so long. Why do people who have done so much to promote capitalism, also do so much to destroy it.

Everyone be sure to check out the Volokh Conspiracy this week. Jeff Rowes Guest-Blogging This Week on the Bone Marrow Compensation Case

Filed Monday, October 26, 2009, in federal court in Los Angeles, Flynn v. Holder challenges the federal ban on compensating bone marrow donors. Represented by the Institute for Justice, the plaintiffs are cancer patients and their families, a renowned bone marrow specialist, and a California nonprofit called MoreMarrowDonors.org. MoreMarrowDonors.org wants to award the most needed bone marrow donors a $3,000 scholarship, housing allowance, or gift to the donor’s favorite charity. But the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA), 42 U.S.C. § 274e, treats giving a scholarship to a college student for donating marrow like black-market organ-selling.

This makes no sense. NOTA was enacted to criminalize markets in nonrenewable solid organs, such as kidneys. Bone marrow, however, is just immature blood and, like blood, replenishes itself after donation. NOTA’s criminal ban, which imposes up to a five-year sentence, violates equal protection because it arbitrarily treats renewable bone marrow like nonrenewable solid organs instead of like other renewable or inexhaustible cells — such as blood, sperm, or eggs — for which compensated donation is legal. The ban also violates substantive due process because it irrationally interferes with the right to participate in safe, accepted, lifesaving, and otherwise legal medical treatment.

I am really looking forward to Jeff’s views on the equal protection and substantive due process violations caused by NOTA.