DeLong Tries to Put the Historical Record Straight

Here is a very nice post by economist Brad DeLong. It shows the historical and constitutional illiteracy of the right who attack Obama's health care (which is really just a slight modification of Republican Mitt Romney's health care system for Massachusetts):

I Think That Jason Kuznicki Does Not Understand the History...

by Brad DeLong

Jason writes:

What Can’t Congress Do Now?: If the federal government can force you to buy health insurance merely for being alive — on the theory that your inaction, while stubbornly remaining alive, has indirect effects on interstate commerce — then what can’t the federal government force you to do? It’s a question I noted Randy Barnett asking a couple months ago, with some added salience now that a federal judge has ruled the individual mandate unconstitutional. Others have been asking similar questions, including Megan McArdle and Radley Balko. The American left would like very much to find good answers...

It is a simple fact that health care is big commerce today--one out of every six dollars we spend is spent on health care. And it is a simple fact that all commerce these days is interstate commerce--that is the inevitable consequence of the invention of the railroad. This means that congress's enumerated power:

To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow money on the credit of the United States; To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States...

is a plenary power to regulate the health care sector. You are going to be paying somebody something for health care during your life. Congress has the power to regulate when, how, to whom, and how much. That is simply what the Constitution says.

Jason Kuznicki wishes that the Constitution says otherwise: he thinks that a constitutional grant of plenary power to regulate--and thus control--all commercial activity that affects interstate commerce produces a government that is much too powerful. It may well be. That is why there have been repeated attempts to read the Fifth Amendment:

nor shall any person be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...

as a protection of private economic property from government regulation rather than as what it is: a declaration that you cannot be executed, imprisoned, or fined by the government save through proper legal procedures (a declaration that now appears to be a dead letter--but that is a topic for another day).

The fact is that the founders were not classical liberals.

They did not believe in the free market.

They were, most of them and most of the time, mercantilists of one form or another--taking for granted that governments had broad powers to regulate economic commerce for the public benefit.

This was brought home to me once when I was on a panel with Richard Epstein, who began talking about the eighteenth-century classical-liberal foundations of America's constitutional order--as if the theorists of laissez-faire had written in the mid-eighteenth rather than the mid-nineteenth century.

They did not.

And because they did not, most of the founders most of the time took it for granted that of course the government could channel the use you made of your property as it wished.

Indeed, even the nineteenth-century theorists of laissez-faire were not, by our lights, theorists of laissez-faire.

Ah... but I forget. The Republicans are a "facts be damned!" party of ignorance and blight. Their only proper role is to extort wealth from the poor to deliver to their ultra-rich overlords. Any story, any propaganda, any lie to advance the cause is justified in their ideological war.