Recently by Scott Lazarowitz: Can America's Descent Possibly BeReversed?
No, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on ObamaCare and the individual mandate will not matter, especially when, as protected by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the states have a right to nullify the individual mandate – or all of ObamaCare if they want to.
The statists who rule over us, and their apparatchiks and propagandists, want to assert that the "Civil War settled everything" on issues of nullification and state secession. Those authoritarians suggest that President Abe Lincoln's U.S. government war on the seceding states "settled" the states' (and their individual inhabitants') attempts at independence and the freedom to exercise their right to self-determination and the right to control their own lives.
The statists say that the federal government is supreme and the entire population must obey the will of our high-and-mighty federal rulers. But such an assertion goes against the principles of the American Revolutionaries.
Economic Historian Thomas Woods addressed these issues in his book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century. In an article that appeared last year, Woods addressed specific points made by the critics of nullification.
Of course people have a right to buy or to not buy health insurance. And yes, that right to choose is just as inherent and God-given a right as are the rights to self-defense and free speech. Just because the Bill of Rights does not list such a right to choose to buy or not to buy health insurance does not mean that such a choice is not a right.
The Bill of Rights could not possibly enumerate all the rights we as individual human beings have, or such a list would never end. This was addressed by the Ninth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which states: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Some people believe that the federal government is empowered to tell the people what to do, and that federal bureaucrats are our bosses. But the reverse is true. The states had formed the federal government as an agent to act on behalf of the states' interests. The federal government is employed by the people of the states. The people of the states are the federal government's boss.
And it was especially Lincoln's war against the people that reinforced the reversal of that original relationship into a centralized, federal dictatorship. President Barack Obama's communist-like recent Executive Order to seize all of America's resources, including food, agriculture, water and labor resources during non-emergency peacetime was a huge step further down America's descent into totalitarian tyranny.
Obama's recent Executive Order – in addition to Obama's command that all Americans must buy health insurance – was just the most recent in a long list of federal power-grabs since Lincoln's War on Independence. Here are just a couple more examples:
- The order via legal tender laws that all Americans must use only U.S. government-issued currency as their sole medium of exchange. And this despite the fact that the Federal Reserveu2018s central planning manipulators have distorted prices, caused massive swings in the business cycle, caused constantly high unemployment levels, and devalued the dollar and its purchasing power. Such authoritarian dictatorial policies have greatly diminished freedom and enhanced the bureaucrats' power to steal from us poor slobs.
- The order that all Americans must participate in the federal government-run retirement scheme known as Social Security, against the will and better judgment of individuals. The promises made by the government could not possibly be kept in such an inherently flawed and treacherous scheme. It is immoral for anyone to interfere with an individual's right to save, spend or invest one's earnings or wealth however one wants.
Regarding the Supreme Court, just how has this gang of nine protected our liberty or our rights (particularly, as noted in the American Declaration of Independence, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness)?
Just recently the Supreme Bureaucrats approved of police strip-searching arrestees of minor technical violations such as parking tickets and so forth. In a typical judicial monopoly departure of common sense and in statist loyalty to police power, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that "people detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals." Obviously, Kennedy isn't aware of how local police neanderthals are known to arrest as many civilians as they can in the name of revenue collection quotas (and for jailer pervs to get off on power trips strip-searching innocent people).
In his apparent love for the TSA and his reference to all Americans as potential terrorists, Justice Kennedy went on to state that, "One of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks was stopped and ticketed for speeding just two days before hijacking Flight 93." Hmmm. So we therefore better let the police strip-search Grandma or some teenager on her way to a part-time job, to use Kennedy's obediently childlike reasoning.
And last year, in an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Bureaucrats approved of police criminally breaking into private property, and without a warrant, based on an officer's belief that residents are flushing marijuana down the toilet ("destroying evidence"). "Oooo, someone has marijuana in his own home, we better break in and get him!" This decision shows just how much government schooling has influenced even the highest public officials in the land.
The common sense opinion by Justices would be to nullify the actual law that police are illegally trying to enforce, such as laws against harmless and victimless drug possession. And this common sense approach should apply to the Court's decision on ObamaCare as well.
I am assuming that a President Ron Paul's Supreme Court Justices would not only strike down bad laws or policies such as ObamaCare based on violations of particular Constitutional protections, but that they would also outright nullify bad laws based on common sense, the Constitution notwithstanding.
After all, the U.S. Constitution itself has been a flawed document from the beginning, and the product of Hamiltonian centralists who got the Leviathan monstrosity they wanted, despite the Anti-Federalists'protests. As we have seen, from Lincoln to Wilson to Roosevelt to Bush/Obama, and from the Supreme Court, the FBI, the CIA and police departments all over America, the Constitution has been ignored time and again. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has observed, the Constitution is itself "unconstitutional" in its multiple self-contradictions.
What the Constitution actually did was, instead of being a document whose rules and provisions were to protect the rights and liberty of the individual, it empowered a centralized, federal government to rule over the masses, and gave such an institution monopoly powers. Those monopoly powers go against the very core of the rights of the individual and the individual's freedom to choose amongst various competitors in various industries, in health care, retirement planning, food and nutrition, and many other areas.
19th Century individualist Lysander Spooner observed that the Constitution has "no inherent authority or obligation," and that the Constitution's alleged contractual obligations are to those who signed such a document, but not to others. (Members of the "Supreme" Court need to read more Lysander Spooner and less Barack Obama and Paul Krugman.)
Now, regarding Obama's SovietCare and the idea of insurance mandates or government takeovers of the medical care industry (which has been Obama's intention all along), Lew Rockwell noted that this socialized medicine is really "subsidizing sickness." To me, health insurance discourages people to take care of themselves toward prevention of illnesses in the first place. An insurance mandate orders people to not act preventatively, and it implies that they should increase risky behaviors and lifestyles.
Unfortunately, rather than advocating personal responsibility and removing governmental restrictions on our medical freedom, politicians such as FDR, LBJ, Obama and Nancy Lugosi have gone the other way in diminishing our medical freedom and becoming more and more intrusive in our private personal matters.
But Hans-Hermann Hoppe had this better four-step solution to the health care situation in America:
- Eliminate all licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other health-care personnel. Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health-care services would appear on the market…
- Eliminate all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices. This means no more Food and Drug Administration, which presently hinders innovation and increases costs…
- Deregulate the health-insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control. One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for example, because it is in one’s own hands to bring these events about…
- Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate such subsidies, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives and to work for a living. In the first instance, that means abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.
As Hoppe noted, "only these four steps, although drastic, will restore a fully free market in medical provision. Until they are adopted, the industry will have serious problems, and so will we, its consumers."
But, regardless how the Supreme Bureaucrats decide, and in addition to our exercising our right to nullify federal dictates, the real solution to protecting ourselves from clueless bureaucrats and their totalitarian medical intrusions is this: DON'T GET SICK!
