In 1955 when Tennessee Ernie Ford sang “Sixteen Tons,” American society chalked it up as something belonging to the long-lost past . Listen to the lyrics because they could well become part of the American future.
The federal government could transform itself into the “Company Store” and We the People its slaves.
On Monday morning, November 14, the Supreme Court announced it will hear five hours of oral arguments in the challenges to the Affordable Care Act, brought by 26 states and several private parties.
The Justice Department has already argued in the lower courts in favor of the law's "individual mandate," which requires virtually all Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty on their tax returns. They hold that it falls within Congress' power under the commerce clause of Article 1. They will continue with this argument in the high court.
Those bringing suit against the law will argue the unconstitutionality of the individual mandate as they have done all along. They truthfully cite the Constitution in saying that it grants no power to the federal government to require citizens to purchase a product or service.
If the court upholds the Constitution, it will strike down the individual mandate. And since the law hinges on that pesky little clause, we can then all go home and shove Obamacare into the recesses of our mind with all our other best-forgotten memories and get on with our lives.
On the other hand, if the court holds the mandate as constitutional, we then have a problem because then We the People become nothing more than slaves indebted to the federal government—the “Company Store”— replete with all the inherent evils we’ve read about in history books.
Logically, if the government can require citizens to buy one product or service, then they can mandate the purchase of innumerable products and services. They have nothing to stop them. And the way this administration has been “investing” in the private sector through bailouts, they could require us to buy those particular products and services and then tax our wages to pay for them.
Logically, the government could require us to buy a particular kind of health insurance (government insurance), a particular kind of car (like a Chevy Volt), bank at a particular bank (one of the bailed-out banks, of course), and purchase Solyndra solar panels for our homes. Ah, yes, then there’s the matter of home sweet home. We could all move into government housing and sign up for food stamps.
And to pay for it all, we wouldn’t have to worry our pretty little heads about it. We could do it all on the installment plan: they’d garnish our wages. Finally, in the interest of efficiency, the government would require employers—by now all government owned anyway—to send our paychecks off to the government to pay for all our purchases and send us an allowance each month for little incidentals.
By the time we realized the extent of our enslavement, it would be too late. Of course, we could move to another country but only after we’ve repaid the debt for all our required purchases, but that would take time, maybe forever. And the longer we stay, the more in debt we become. After all, we need to buy healthcare insurance month after month, pay for shelter, and eat.
We have about four months until this bill comes to court, probably in the third or fourth week of March 2012. They will most likely rule on it by the end of June before the Court’s summer recess. Let’s hope and pray that these justices, deemed the wisest in the land, will see the dangers of this law and preserve our freedoms.
