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Mandatory insurance & regulating inactivity: a radical constitutional departure

Ilya Somin of George Mason U. writes:

[Last] week, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that the individual mandate of federal health care reform is constitutional. This is undeniably a setback for mandate opponents. The mandate requires nearly all Americans to purchase government-approved health insurance by 2014.The Martin-Sutton approach opens the floodgates to an unlimited congressional power to mandate personal behavior. Any failure to purchase a product has some substantial economic effect, at least when aggregated with similar failures by other people. This is certainly true of failures to purchase broccoli, failures to purchase cars, failure to buy a movie ticket, and so on. Each of these choices affects the economy and leaves producers worse off than they would be if more people bought their products. Even failure to engage in noncommercial activity nearly always has such effects.

via JURIST – Forum: Regulating Inactivity: A Radical Constitutional Departure.