Any constitution merely prolongs the pretense that political government can be limited by laws that it will interpret. Eventually, every constitutional government will embrace Lenin’s ruling formula: “Power without limit, resting directly on force.” How exquisitely appropriate that in the case of the socialist monstrosity called Obamacare this was done by a Bush-appointed Republican conservative.
As the ever-perspicuous Butler Shaffer points out, the federal government has “never deviated” from the Constitution: The document was written in a way that encouraged government expansion and provided the means to accomplish it while sustaining the necessary illusion that its powers were effectively limited by law and its administrators were in some sense accountable to the people they rule.
Any governmental charter permitting government seizure of property through “eminent domain” and the suspension of habeas corpus (the irreducible due process guarantee) for any reason is latently totalitarian at best. So we really have no rational reason to be surprised that a conservative statist would ratify the proposition that the Regime can steal our lives incrementally through taxation — backed by the threat of summary life-stealing through imprisonment or execution — in order to force us to submit to a corporatist health care scheme in which the same Regime will regulate every aspect of that portion of our lives it permits us to retain.
11:05 am on June 28, 2012
