At The National Review, Andrew McCarthy makes the argument that many Republicans do not. Does the Constitution allow the federal government to establish a welfare state, and if so, where in the constitution do we find that authority? For originalists the answer is clearly that we find no such authority in the constitution. And that means that most of what the government has been doing since the days of FDR is a violation of the original intent of those who wrote our founding documents.
The deeper problem in the recent ruling from the court on the question of Obamacare is that it does not question the idea that the government can legitimately take money from the productive and give to the non-productive for the purpose of equalizing outcomes. It is this basic idea that is responsible for the ongoing destruction of our economy and the nation. Commentators have been tending to focus on the question of whether the mandate is a tax or not. And while that is important, it does not really get to the heart of the matter. The entire edifice of the welfare state is the invention of the left for which there is no authority in our constitution and which is, in fact, a violation of the very idea of a limited government. Freedom and a welfare state are not compatible. In the end you can have one or the other, but not both.
Ultimately this is a moral argument that conservatives must be willing to make. The federal government has no right to take from those who produce wealth and give it away to those who did not earn that wealth. When an individual does that we call him a criminal. When a group of people in the government do the same thing, the theft is not made more legitimate. People in the country must understand that they cannot keep their freedom if government can redistribute what they earn. As individuals, our time and effort are finite. The wealth that we work for and earn is created at the cost of our time and effort. When the government equalizes outcomes, it has to take some portion of your life to do so. And that is not right.
But, at the risk of being a broken record, we remain focused on the wrong issue because conservatives and Republicans do not want any part of the right issue. Congress would not be able to tax anyone a penny if the subject matter on which lawmakers sought to spend the money raised was not within Congress’s constitutional authority to address. Health care and health insurance are precisely such issues. So why does Congress get to raise taxes for and spend money on them? Because the country — very much including Republican leaders and many conservatives — has bought on to the wayward progressive premise that the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution empowers Congress to spend on anything it wants to spend on as long as their is some fig-leaf that ties the spending to the betterment of society. That, and not an inflated understanding of the Commerce Clause, has always been the problem. Republicans are afraid to touch this because, if you follow the logic, you’d have to conclude that Congress has no constitutional authority to set up a Social Security system, a Medicare or Medicaid program, or most of the innumerable Big Government enterprises that Republicans support while, of course, decrying Big Government. Republicans occasionally want to limit what government spends, but they don’t want to acknowledge any constitutional limits on what government could spend — that’s what has gotten us to this point.
