That's interesting because one of the Founding Fathers, John Adams, singed a law that was passed by a Congress with many of the Founding Fathers, that mandated private citizens, merchant marine, purchasing health insurance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Act_for_the_relief_of_sick_and_disabled_seamen
"If the federal government can compel a private citizen, under threat of a federally imposed penalty, to engage in a private contract with a private entity (to buy health insurance), is there anything the federal government cannot compel the citizen to do?" By Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post
You didn't state that in your post but anyway the point remains that the Founding Fathers did pass laws that require private citizens to engage in contracts with private entities. You can say that the scope is different but the principle is there.
it's not the same principle. ACA compels all citizens to buy insurance, for no reason other than they are citizens. the example you site is quite different.
You are wrong, and don't know the facts or deliberately misstate them. It doesn't compel anyone to buy insurance. Everyone is free to not buy the insurance and pay the penalty. They can do so without any criminal record being attached to their name. There is no compulsion to buy insurance. You're also moving the goal post. Your initial gripe was about the govt. forcing citizens to buy insurance. Either the principle is constitutional or not. The fact that it was applied by authors of the constitution to private citizens shows that the principle involved is fine with constitution. The application being widespread of limited doesn't change the principle.
Slave Owners=Liberals? Sounds 'bout right to me, amirite? Please, stop using the founding fathers to pimp your beliefs.
Perhaps you should return to grade school and take a refresher course in elementary American history.
During their time, they were pretty "liberal" in that they were radically changing how government governed the populace and introducing the Bill or Rights was a pretty "liberal" step. By today's standard, however, they were incredibly conservative. Most of them fought hard for state's rights and wanted to severely limit the federal government's role in people's lives. Remember, they had just revolted against a "tyrant" and wanted to set up a system with limited government. Many of the functions of today's government (Medicare, Social Security, and the various bureaucratic, non-elected agencies such as the EPA or Homeland Security) would have been so far an intrusion of the federal government into their lives, they would have been very worried. Remember, many of them thought a central bank was the most evil thing ever to be mentioned in the world.
An excellent article showing how the Founders did not hate government, but the conservatives and the Paulites have falsely claimed that they did. They quote Madison very selectively and ignore that one of the whole points of the Constitution replacing the Article so Confederation was to create a strong central government. According to the author the left has unwisely ceeded the debate about the Framer's intent to the right. Worth readiing in its entirety, but a few excerpts. http://truth-out.org/news/item/8080-did-the-founders-hate-government? ******** Did the Founders Hate Government? Saturday, 24 March 2012 13:14 By Robert Parry, Consortium News | News Analysis 174 font size Print Email Orwell’s insight - that who controls the present controls the past, and who controls the past controls the future - could apply to the American political debate in which the Right has built a false narrative that enlists the Framers of the Constitution as enemies of a strong central government, writes Robert Parry. In the coming months – with a new fight over the federal budget, the Supreme Court’s review of health-care reform and the November elections – the battle in the United States will pit not just political parties and economic ideologies against one another – but competing national narratives of how and why the United States was founded. Indeed, it is that conflict over the American narrative that may well determine the outcome of the presidential election and the future direction of the United States. Yet, this dispute over the Founders’ vision is rarely debated in the mainstream news media. ... The Right’s historical narrative holds that the Founders designed the United States to have a weak central government barred from confronting most domestic problems (though with broad powers for defense). Under this “free-market” system, wealthy business interests had the “liberty” to set their own rules and the average citizen had the “freedom” to make his way the best he could. There is, of course, a counter-narrative, but Democrats and progressives rarely make it, preferring to cede the history to the Right and to argue that the Founders couldn’t possibly have anticipated the complex problems of the modern age. Still, the counter-narrative to the GOP mythology is grounded in solid history. Indeed, the evidence is that most constitutional framers were pragmatic men interested in building a strong nation. They also were fed up with the weak central government under the Articles of Confederation. They surely weren’t anti-government ideologues. In the Constitution, they created a robust central authority, stating in the preamble the explicit responsibility of the government “to promote the general Welfare.” The document also granted the federal government broad domestic powers, including authority to regulate interstate commerce, the so-called Commerce Clause. Framing the Commerce Clause Plus, the Commerce Clause was not some afterthought at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was presented as one of the new federal powers in James Madison’s Virginia plan on the first day of substantive debate. It also was considered one of the least controversial features of the new governing framework. Indeed, constitutional architect Madison had been maneuvering to give this power to the federal government for years, seeking such a change in the Articles of Confederation, which governed the United States from 1777 to 1787. ... In spring 1787 – with a convention called in Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation – Madison unveiled his radical alternative, not simply some modifications to the Articles but an entirely new system that wiped away the Articles’ language about the “independence” and “sovereignty” of the states. ... So, from the very start of the debate on a new Constitution, Madison and other key framers recognized that a legitimate role of the U.S. Congress was to ensure that the nation could match up against other countries economically and could address problems impeding the nation’s economic success and the public welfare. ... As resistance to Madison’s plan spread – and as states elected delegates to ratifying conventions – Madison feared that his constitutional masterwork would go down to defeat or be subjected to a second convention that might remove important federal powers like the Commerce Clause. Finessing the Opposition So, Madison – along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay – began a series of essays, called the Federalist Papers, designed to counter the fierce (though generally accurate) attacks by the Anti-Federalists against the broad assertion of federal power in the Constitution. Madison’s strategy was essentially to insist that the drastic changes contained in the Constitution were not all that drastic, an approach he took both as a delegate to the Virginia ratifying convention and in the Federalist Papers. Today’s Right has sought to transform Madison from his role as the chief advocate for a strong central government into the opposite – a modern-day Tea Partier before his time – by citing Federalist Paper No. 45, entitled “The Alleged Danger From the Powers of the Union to the State Governments Considered,” in which Madison used the pseudonym Publius. ... The building of canals, as an argument in support of the Commerce Clause and the Constitution, further reflects the pragmatic – and commercial – attitudes of key founders. In 1785, two years before the Constitutional Convention, George Washington founded the Potowmack Company, which began the work of digging canals to extend navigable waterways westward where he and other Founders had invested in Ohio and other undeveloped lands. Thus, the idea of involving the central government in major economic projects – a government-business partnership to create jobs and profits – was there from the beginning. Madison, Washington and other early American leaders saw the Constitution as creating a dynamic system so the young country could grow and overcome the daunting challenges of its vast territory. The Founders did debate the proper limits of federal and state powers, but again Madison and Washington came down on the side of making federal statutes and treaties the supreme law of the land. (Madison had even favored giving Congress veto power over each state law, but settled for granting the federal courts the authority to overturn state laws that violated federal statutes.) ... Increasingly, the Right pitched itself as the defender of the nation’s founding ideals. Any time the central government sought to address vexing national problems – from the need to regulate Wall Street to extending health coverage to the tens of millions of uninsured Americans – these proposals were labeled “unconstitutional.” Some right-wing jurists, most notably Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, advocated “originalism,” insisting that constitutional powers should apply only to what the Founders had in mind at the time. The Right ignored the clear record that the Founders intended their governing structure to meet both their immediate needs and the distant interests of their “posterity.” ... As the discussion about canal building shows, Madison, Washington and other key framers were pragmatists. One-Sided Debate Yet, while the Right was bending the founding narrative to its purposes, the Left largely dismissed the importance of this debate, perhaps in part because the Left tends to disdain many Founders as slave-owning aristocrats who hypocritically denied their precious “unalienable rights” to women, blacks, Indians, the poor and many others. While that surely was true, the nation’s founding narrative retains a strong mythic appeal to many Americans – and the Right’s twisting of the history has proved a powerful tactic to rally many middle- and working-class Americans, particularly white men, to the Tea Party cause and to the Republican Party]. ....
