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Justice Roberts: I Am A Coward
- Thread starter AAAintheBeltway
- Start date
Quote from jem:
that was the old liberals... which we libertarians are. We welcome your right to be wrong, just dont spend our money or mess with our freedoms.
you new liberals are far closer to big govt 1984 marxists.
I say that without a hint of a joke. You really should examine your values.
If you are for bigger govt and not bigger liberty and constitutional rights... you are not a liberal.
Sorry, but I think things like the EPA are smart. Single payer health care is smart. A coherent energy use policy is smart. Requiring guns to be registered and violent felons not being allowed to buy them is smart. Giving equal rights to gays and understanding that being gay is not a choice is smart. Raising efficiency standards for central A/C and cars is smart.
All these things should be handled by the government. If we're smart our government has a chance to be smart also. Which will improve our lot.
exactly. there are some things a competitive market cant handle. no manufacturer wants to be the first to build air conditioners that are more effecient because they cost more. if they built them they would be at a competitive disadvantage. but if the government sets minimum standards all manufactures have an even playing field.Quote from futurecurrents:
Sorry, but I think things like the EPA are smart. Single payer health care is smart. A coherent energy use policy is smart. Requiring guns to be registered and violent felons not being allowed to buy them is smart. Giving equal rights to gays and understanding that being gay is not a choice is smart. Raising efficiency standards for central A/C and cars is smart.
All these things should be handled by the government. If we're smart our government has a chance to be smart also. Which will improve our lot.
when i was in business i wanted to give my employees health insurance. i eventually did but it was tough. most of my competitors did not so they had a cost advantage over me. every time i bid a job i had a tough time making money. if the government had mandated that everyone furnish health insurance the playing field would have been level.
Quote from futurecurrents:
Sorry, but I think things like the EPA are smart. Single payer health care is smart. A coherent energy use policy is smart. Requiring guns to be registered and violent felons not being allowed to buy them is smart. Giving equal rights to gays and understanding that being gay is not a choice is smart. Raising efficiency standards for central A/C and cars is smart.
All these things should be handled by the government. If we're smart our government has a chance to be smart also. Which will improve our lot.
1. understanding that pollution costs need to be factored into price so society can properly allocate resources are smart. The EPA is leftist big govt trash. it needs to be cleaned up and made more efficient.
2. Having an energy policy which reduced dependence on foreign oil and Nuclear power (with the waste it is currently generating would be nice) so far we have never seen such a thing as an energy policy... yet alone coherent. What we have is big govt waste
3. That is where you started with gun control but that is not where you are stopping.
4. gays already have equal rights. and when you start requiring me to believe something which is clearly not true for all gays... you start entering the grounds of nazis and communists. Believe what you want to believe...but understand it is not fact.
5. agreed..
now lets make a list of all the leftist b.s. you promote.
Quote from Free Thinker:
exactly. there are some things a competitive market cant handle. no manufacturer wants to be the first to build air conditioners that are more effecient because they cost more. if they built them they would be at a competitive disadvantage. but if the government sets minimum standards all manufactures have an even playing field.
when i was in business i wanted to give my employees health insurance. i eventually did but it was tough. most of my competitors did not so they had a cost advantage over me. every time i bid a job i had a tough time making money. if the government had mandated that everyone furnish health insurance the playing field would have been level.
take a few steps back, if more efficient air conditioners are not built in a free market it simply means energy has more efficient uses elsewhere
Quote from bigarrow:
I've always thought a lot of fines and penalties were back door taxes. Guess ol judge Roberts is correct in his thinking.
You have a very good point. There is a fine line. And that perhaps is what GofCutten fails to recognize.
The U.S. has, for years, used taxing as an incentive to get its citizens to do one thing or another, and non-taxing, i.e., tax credits similarly. A Fine or penalty is also an incentive not to do one thing or another, or is it a penalty when you have done something you are not to do?
This is not at all a clear cut issue. Reasonable people can come down on either side. If you see this as a black or white issue you're not looking clearly. It's gray.
Quote from OccupyThis:
A good read:
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Confused Opinion
By RICHARD A. EPSTEIN
Published: June 28, 2012
THE stunner yesterday was that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by the Supreme Courtâs four most liberal justices, wrote the majority opinion that upheld the individual mandate in President Obamaâs signature Affordable Care Act, which requires Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. In an ironic twist, the chief justice simultaneously accepted the conservative argument that Congressâs power to regulate interstate commerce did not include the power to regulate economic inactivity, like a decision not to purchase health care. The court ruled 5 to 4 on that point, with the chief justice joined by the courtâs four other conservative justices.
But what Chief Justice Roberts took from Congress with one hand, he gave it with the other: a broad reading of the taxing power. In the majority opinion, he wrote that since paying a penalty for not obtaining insurance could be seen as a tax, and since âthe Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.â He will no doubt attract praise in some quarters for splitting this baby.
But his decision is wrong. As a matter of constitutional text, legal history and logic, the power to regulate commerce and the power to tax should not be separated. It is not good for the court or the country that the chief justiceâs position in such an important case is confused at its core.
Consider first the constitutional text. Chief Justice Roberts refers to Congressâs power to âlay and collect Taxes.â But itâs worth recalling the surrounding language, which notes that Congress has the power to âlay and collect Taxesâ only in order âto pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.â
Historically speaking, this clause corrected one of the great weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation (the precursor to the Constitution), which had forced Congress to essentially beg the states for the revenues needed to run its business. By giving Congress independent powers over taxation and other revenue sources, the Constitution ended that dependency. But as a quid pro quo, the Constitution also restricted the use of these revenues to classical public goods â benefits that must be given to all citizens, if given to any â like paying off national debts and paying for the nationâs defense. General welfare, mentioned in parallel with these two phrases, is best read as covering only matters that advance the welfare of the United States as a whole. The redistribution of income, or âtransfer paymentsâ among citizens, like those mandated under the Affordable Care Act, doesnât qualify for taxation in this originalist reading of the Constitution.
Through the early 20th century, the Supreme Court was cognizant of this tight relationship between the power to regulate an activity directly and to the power to tax it. The basic idea relies on a simple economic insight: taxation and regulation are close substitutes, so a limitation on one power matters little if the other power is still available. There is no practical difference between ordering an action, and taxing or fining people who donât do that same thing. If the Constitution limits direct federal powers, it must also limit Congressâs indirect power of taxation.
In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts didnât come to grips with the two critical early Supreme Court cases that set out the relationship between the powers of regulation and taxation â a relationship that survived the New Deal revolution in understanding the Commerce Clause. In the Child Labor Tax case of 1922, the Supreme Court refused to uphold a tax equal to 10 percent of the net profits of any firm that shipped goods into interstate commerce if the firm used child labor anywhere in its plants. Chief Justice William Howard Taft noted that the courtâs earlier decision in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) forbade Congress to use its commerce power to prohibit outright the shipment of ordinary goods across state lines because they were made in factories that used child labor. A heavy tax, the court argued, could not be used to mount an end run around this constitutional obstacle to its own power.
The same point was reinforced in 1936 in United States v. Butler, which struck down a tax on agricultural commodities because it sought to achieve the then unconstitutional regulatory aim of reducing the total acreage in agricultural production. After the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn, when the Commerce Clause was held to permit such regulation, the tax became just as permissible as direct regulation. Wickard expanded the scope of federal power, but it did nothing to upset the constitutional parity between the taxing and commerce powers.
Chief Justice Roberts has ignored this fundamental principle: If direct regulation is beyond the scope of the Commerce Clause (as he held), then taxation as an indirect route to the same regulation should be off limits as well (as he failed to hold). This is a baby that should not be split. His attempt to do so undermines his ruling, the court and the Constitution.
I read with great interest Richard Epstein's learned OP-Ed piece above posted by Occupy This.
It would seem that Epstein may have gone wrong in the last paragraph where he attempts to make an argument on the basis of the ACA insurance mandate being germane to the issue of commerce regulation. It seems to me that once you have determined that the Commerce Clause is non-germane, as Roberts did, you are left with a pure taxation argument. After all, not all taxes are tied to interstate commerce regulation. So although Epstein makes a good case for the close tie between taxation and commerce, they are not necessarily tied, as countless examples show. Once you have divorced taxation from commerce regulation you have opened the door to countless examples of taxation, or non-taxation, i.e., tax credits, being used as incentives or disincentives. I see Roberts argument as consistent with the idea of using tax as an incentive to do something or not to do it. And in that respect, I don't agree with Epstein's position that Roberts was wrong because "If direct regulation is beyond the scope of the Commerce Clause (as he held), then taxation as an indirect route to the same regulation should be off limits as well."
In other words, once you have determined that the Commerce Clause is not germane to the issue at hand, as the majority held, then you are no longer bound by the historical tie between the regulation of interstate commerce and taxation (as in Wickard v. Filburn, for instance) and you are now free to consider the issue purely as a question of whether a "tax", which the majority considered the "penalty" for non-compliance with the mandate to be, is constitutional or not. Furthermore, since one has a choice between paying a tax or buying insurance the majority held that there is no mandate, but rather a choice.
It seems Epstein has failed to recognize the many varied uses of the taxation power that are clearly divorced from the commerce clause. And any argument he might make to insist on a close tie between taxation and the Commerce Clause is clearly refuted by long standing practice. I'm afraid it is just a little too late to expect for such an argument to prevail before the Court in cases deemed not to be a question of interstate commerce regulation.
But it's a forced choice based on non activity.
When I see this kind of statement in the context of human behavior I'm always immediately suspicious. Humans bring their values to every calculation, so what are the values not mentioned in your statement, I wonder; it appears to bridge indifferent calculations of energy efficiency with... laissez faire economics?Quote from Voodoo-king:
take a few steps back, if more efficient air conditioners are not built in a free market it simply means energy has more efficient uses elsewhere
Hacking out some approaches, efficacy comes to mind, and the time over which simple efficiency is measured, and barriers to entry, and the time value of money, and to whom the benefits of improved efficiency/efficacy accrue.
So, when you say "simply means energy has more efficient uses elsewhere", do you mean, more efficient cooling uses elsewhere?