Letters: 'Obamacare' law only the first step
The score is in: President Barack Obama, 1, Constitution, 0. Is it a tax, or a penalty? It’s neither; it is a crime. But it matters not; the “total state” has arrived. We can now be taxed on an inaction.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ convoluted decision regarding the president’s so-called Affordable Care Act has changed the landscape for liberty in America.
To say that forcing a citizen to purchase something is unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause but then to say it’s OK to penalize (tax) that person if their response is a refusal to comply is a distinction without a difference. This opens wide a new Pandora’s box for the continual erosion of our liberty going forward and would immediately be recognized as tyrannical by our Founding generation.
When government can potentially control anything and everything, which is now the case, then everything becomes political. A government formed for the purpose of securing our liberties has morphed into a vehicle for institutionalized theft and wealth transfers, which views all of its subjects as so many milk cows.
Far from the vision of the Founders of government as an impartial referee in the background, this ruling means that those who are not active in the political process will be eaten alive by those who are. If government is now able to force a citizen to initiate an action, under threat of penalty, then there is no limit to where this can take us.
Once people realize that “free” medical care isn’t free, it will be too late to alter our course. There will be very little medicine and very little care. The connected elites will do well, and the very groups intended as the beneficiaries will fare the worst, as is the case with these schemes throughout the world, once the socialism has consumed the carcass of what’s left of the free market.
The evidence of the failure of this course is readily available to us. It is tragic that we continue to ignore it.
How ironic it is that as we observed July Fourth, which we celebrate for our independence and liberty, we are visited by the erosion of both by a paternalistic, unconstitutional government and its accomplices who sit on the highest court in the land.
Mike Thibodeaux
physician
Baton Rouge