Long one. A lot of thought provoking stuff.........
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/29/2012 19:12 -0400
Guest Post
Ludwig von Mises
Mises Institute
Obamacare
Purchasing Power
Totalitarianism
Submitted by James Miller of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada
The Supreme Court And Natural Law
I won a bet today.
A few weeks ago I wagered with a coworker that the United States Supreme Court would uphold the Affordable Care Act otherwise known as Obamacare. He reasoned that the federal government has no authority under the Constitution to force an individual to purchase a product from a private company. My reasoning was much simpler. Because the Supreme Court is a functioning arm of the state, it will do nothing to stunt Leviathan’s growth. The fact that the Court declared no federal law unconstitutional from 1937 to 1995—from the tail end of the New Deal through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society—should have been proof enough. He naively believed in the impartialness of politically-appointed judges. For the first time he saw that those nine individuals are nothing more than politicians with an allegiance to state supremacy.
It was a tough but valuable lesson to learn.
As far as unintended effects are concerned, the economic justification for increased government regulation of the health care industry has been argued countless times up to this point. Proponents of intervention are convinced that more bureaucracies, red tape, and central planning are the answer. They have no knowledge of the pricing system and how it functions as the most efficient means through which consumers and producers can interact to come to an agreeable deal. They don’t realize that the undersupply of doctors and care providers is a direct consequence of previous government intervention and occupational licensing. Many actually believe that Obamacare wasn’t written by the insurance industry and isn’t a fascist-like appeasement of another deep pocketed lobbying campaign.
Common sense economics tells us that Obamacare will only lead to further inefficiencies and rationing as decisions of care continue to be made by third parties. Once fully enacted, doctor offices will likely start resembling that of the waiting area of your local Department of Motor Vehicles.
All that aside, the Supreme Court’s upholding of the Affordable Care Act should serve as an eye opener to those who still believe the state exists as a protector of property and defender of the rule of law.
In the present day, the vast number of edicts coming from Washington can hardly be characterized as laws. “But wait,” you may ask, “when legislation is passed by Congress, signed by the President, and ultimately approved by the Supreme Court, isn’t it now considered the law of the land?” While it is certainly true that whatever scheme envisioned by the political class can be enforced by the state’s monopoly on violence, such rules of governance are more often than not laws in the traditional sense.
Historically, what was known as private or natural law rested upon the rational deduction of a set of ethically-based norms. These norms focused on acts considered morally wrong such as assault, murder, rape, and violations of property in general. Such aggressions were seen by classical liberal thinkers as detrimental to social cooperation. According to 20th century legal scholar Edwin Patterson, the concept of natural law evolved from
Principles of human conduct that are discoverable by “reason” from the basic inclinations of human nature, and that are absolute, immutable and of universal validity for all times and places. This is the basic conception of scholastic natural law . . . and most natural law philosophers.
Or as Murray Rothbard wrote in his book The Ethics of Liberty:
The natural law is, in essence, a profoundly “radical” ethic, for it holds the existing status quo, which might grossly violate natural law, up to the unsparing and unyielding light of reason. In the realm of politics or State action, the natural law presents man with a set of norms which may well be radically critical of existing positive law imposed by the State.
Positive law is the kind enacted by the state that bestows special privileges to specific individuals. Whereas natural law is essentially negative in that it disallows for the violent treatment of others, state-sanctioned positive law is the granting of reward that is necessarily provided by confiscatory taxation or government coercion.
What the state, which is institutionalized predation and force,
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Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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