You will submit

Reason has two posts today about the ongoing controversy on whether the Commerce Clause can compel Americans to purchase something and what that might mean about the limits of government. First up is Jacob Sullum with "The Amazing Elastic Commerce Clause":

In 2005 the Supreme Court said the federal government's power to "regulate commerce…among the several states" extends to the tiniest speck of marijuana wherever it may be found, even in the home of a patient who grows it for her own medical use in compliance with state law. "If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause," Justice Clarence Thomas warned in his dissent, "then it can regulate virtually anything - and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers."

The Obama administration, which was in court this week defending the new federal requirement that every American obtain government-designed health insurance, seems determined to prove Thomas right. But despite seven decades of stretching by a Supreme Court eager to accommodate every congressional whim, the Amazing Elastic Commerce Clause is still not expansive enough to cover the unprecedented command that people purchase a product from a private company in exchange for the privilege of existing.

Peter Suderman follows up with "Can the government require you to eat asparagus? " I keep reading the tea leaves from legal experts and the majority opinion (so far) is that Congress can do whatever the hell it wants in the name of "regulating commerce." Supporters of Obamacare should think long and hard before walking through that door because it opens up the opportunity for all kinds of mischief and Orwellian "penalties that are not a tax" unless they are.