“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, …”
I assume they were not discussing welfare payments for high ranking military officers when they mention "promote the general welfare". And the 16th amendment allows for the government to tax for the purposes of promoting
the general welfare.
16th Amendment
“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
There are numerous other mentions in The Constitution supporting their right to tax you for whatever they deem is for the good of the nation.
And not just to "promote the general welfare" but to "provide" it, as well:
Article 1 Section 8
"Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States;"
It is safe to say that keeping Americans healthy would be providing for the general welfare of the United States.
You may not like it. But that is The Constitution.
As for healthcare being a right? Article 25, section 1 of the Declaration of Human Rights:
“Article 25 Section 1
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care [...]”
Signed by the President of the United States of America and ratified by Congress, healthcare is a right in the USA.
The basis of the Declaration of Human rights was not meant to be an enforceable treaty, but it was to be a recognized document to give legal definitions to generalized ideas like freedom and rights around the world. Things that had, up until then, not really been legally defined have been since that time.
You can and should thank Eleanor Roosevelt for her small part in all of that.
For those of you that screech "free markets" extremism and falsely tout The Constitution, threatening to "Go Galt"? None of this infringes on your rights to pursue “Life, Liberty and Happiness” unless your definition of those things are having a few more bucks so the poor can die of illness. If you think those things than you are an extremist because nothing in The Constitution guarantees you those things as a "right". And, in fact, the legal definitions could not support your extremist misconceptions.
Even Adam Smith, the “
father of modern economics”, recognized that a capitalist society based on free markets would cease to function if there were no taxes, wage controls and strong social safety nets to balance the free markets. From
his wiki:
[...]
Smith has been celebrated by advocates of free market policies as the founder of free market economics, a view reflected in the naming of bodies such as the
Adam Smith Institute, Adam Smith Society
and the Australian Adam Smith Club,
and in terms such as the Adam Smith necktie.
Alan Greenspan argues that, while Smith did not coin the term
laissez-faire, "it was left to Adam Smith to identify the more-general set of principles that brought conceptual clarity to the seeming chaos of market transactions". Greenspan continues that
The Wealth of Nations was "one of the great achievements in human intellectual history".
P. J. O'Rourke describes Adam Smith as the "founder of free market economics".
However, other writers have argued that Smith's support for
laissez-faire has been overstated.
Herbert Stein wrote that the people who "wear an Adam Smith necktie" do it to "make a statement of their devotion to the idea of free markets and limited government", and that this misrepresents Smith's ideas. Stein writes that Smith "was not pure or doctrinaire about this idea. He viewed government intervention in the market with great skepticism ... yet he was prepared to accept or propose qualifications to that policy in the specific cases where he judged that their net effect would be beneficial and would not undermine the basically free character of the system. He did not wear the Adam Smith necktie." In Stein's reading,
The Wealth of Nations could justify the
Food and Drug Administration, the
Consumer Product Safety Commission, mandatory employer health benefits,
environmentalism, and "
discriminatory taxation to deter improper or luxurious behavior"."
I have not bolded any particular part since his entire wiki page is worth the read. Go read it all since…
You’ll also find that Adam Smith, the original free marketeer that founded the line of thought free market extremists screech about in the USA today was also one of the strong influences on communist theories.
Classical economists presented variations on Smith, termed the '
labour theory of value', later Marxian economics descends from classical economics also using Smith's labour theories in part. The first volume of
Karl Marx's major work,
Capital, was published in German in 1867. In it, Marx focused on the labour theory of value and what he considered to be the exploitation of labour by capital. The labour theory of value held that the value of a thing was determined by the labor that went into its production. This contrasts with the modern understanding of
mainstream economics, that the value of a thing is determined by what one is willing to give up to obtain the thing. Smith is often cited not only as the conceptual builder of free markets in capitalism but also as a main contributor to communist theory, via his influence on Marx.
So, if you're against healthcare reform for all of the really stupid reasons? The reasons that are not there in The Constitution and the reasons that don't work in a balanced free market and the reasons that are so extremist they are actually going against The Constitution and the laws of the United States of America:
Please, feel free to "Go Galt" and take all of your communist influence with you.
