About the Commerce Clause

[I apologize for the length of this post, or rather, for the lack of a "jump cut," as I believe it is called. I still haven't figured out how to do one.]

I love that clause of the Constitution. Incidentally, my favorite Stone Temple Pilots song is "Love Song." And when I drive across the country, to make the best time I take the.

Okay, so not everybody calls it "The Interstate Commerce Clause," but my brother seemed to be ignoring that that is a very important part of what the Framers wrote in the clause under moot.

[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;

It is a clause to allow the national congress to regulate interstate commerce (as well as international commerce and that with the tribes), not all commerce in the land. Not a moot point, especially in the matter of insurance, which in many states is confined to intrastate insurers by regulation. If Congress limited themselves to interstate commerce, we would not be having this discussion, and perhaps we would not have a $14 trillion+ debt, $70 trillion+ in unfunded liabilities, and calls to raise the debt ceiling still higher. "Congress shall make no law..." -my favorite words in the Constitution. Also on my Nice List: the 10th Amendment, which makes explicit what was to be understood about the enumeration of powers within the Constitution, to wit, that they are the only powers Congress and the President and the Federal Courts were to have, to the exclusion of all other powers or authority. In fact, hardly anyone in prison has so thoroughly or often broken the law as a junior senator or one-term president, let alone the life-long politicians. Should the penalty for breaking the highest law in the land be any less than the penalty for breaking a local marijuana possession law? If not, and I think not, Obama, almost everyone in congress, Bush, and most everyone who ever swore to uphold the Constitution should be in jail.

But here we get right down to the problem with having a Constitution in the first place. It is subject to interpretation, and it is in the interest of those in power to interpret their own powers broadly, and to interpret the limitations of their powers narrowly. Then those that enforce the law have no reason to risk their jobs by doing what is right, since it is so easy to convince themselves that going with the flow is morally right. ("If it's so wrong to write my own warrant or arrest someone exercising their natural rights, then why would everyone else at the precinct or the agency or the bureau be doing it?") With every unconstitutional power grab rewarded with more power, more prestige, and more money (if not in salary, then in budget, which you get to use to buy and build stuff within certain guidelines, like real-life Monopoly), both in elected office and unelected office, there is nothing to limit the scope of government in fact, as the Constitution purports to in theory, except the will of the people, which has been very weak for most of the last hundred years.

Yes, I am a libertarian, and stating that economics is a matter of life and death to everyone in all places and all times, or some similar sweepingly grandiose claim, may seem to lend support to some particular illiberal power grab or its purported Constitutionality, but the Constitution itself is very specific in what it allows Congress to do and oversee. Economics (and I'm starting to wish I had said "praxeology"), as I presented it a few posts back, is the ordination (in the non-ecclesiastical sense) of subjective value, and the study thereof; commerce, in contrast, is the exchange of tangible property, certainly an important part of economics, but not the whole. For Congress to attempt to regulate a noncatallactic aspect of everyday life is thus unconstitutional (at least by the Commerce Clause) even if it were occurring across state lines.

In any case, I don't endorse everything in the Constitution except to say that it is the law of our land (unconstitutional laws arguably not so -but that is a discussion for another time), and we must try to hold our rulers to it until we come up with something better (perhaps some kind of Articles of Confederation). And even if I thought Obama and Congress were allowed to do something wouldn't mean I necessarily wanted them to. They have the Constitutional authority, between them, to declare war on the United Kingdom and send war ships and troops. I do not support such a plan, but I do not dispute their authority to implement it under the Constitution.

I don't see the big contradiction in my view here, but then again, my self-awareness record seems pretty poor lately.