Followup on Attitudes Toward Concentrated Power

A new poll reinforces a point that we discussed in class this past week. CNN reports:

A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.

James Madison and Health Care

Why are the Constitution and Federalist relevant to health care? Explains Charles Lane of The Washington Post:

Everyone has his own explanation for the fact that the U.S. still doesn’t have a national health plan while all the other industrial democracies do. Here’s mine: The constitution.

I don’t mean that Obama’s plan, or any other, actually violates the constitution. Perhaps Congress lacks the authority to impose an individual mandate. Or perhaps not. I mean that the whole effort to create a new national health insurance system all at once flies in the face of this country’s quirky but durable 18th-century political structure. The Obama plan isn’t so much unconstitutional as it is counter-constitutional.

For better or worse, our founding document disfavors comprehensive national legislation of any kind -- let alone bills that seek to reconfigure 17 percent of the economy. This was intentional, of course. The Framers wanted to create a government that would protect the new country from foreign threats and foster trade among its constituent parts, but would not threaten liberty, which they defined as the freedom of individuals, states and localities to govern themselves.

Lane quotes Federalist 51:

While all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.

Click here to read the entire article.