David Brooks Doing the David Brooks Thing

There are aspects of this David Brooks column in the New York Times with which I'd very much like to agree. (I'm much more inclined toward moderation than folks 'round here seem to perceive me to be, except naturally those farther to the right.) But a couple examples of... what? wishful thinking? the sloppiness that obsessive moderation begets?... demand highlighting.

Take, for prime example, Brooks's phrasing of a popular statement voiced around the center-right Internet throughout the day:

Roberts and six colleagues also restrained the power of the federal government to sanction the states. And, perhaps most important, he restrained future Congressional power.

The Supreme Court did no such thing. It drew a line for use of the Commerce Clause to expand federal power well beyond where it actually ought to be, and then it opened up a whole new vista of possibilities in the form of creeping taxation. What is the ObamaCare tax? Is it a "sin tax," as with cigarettes, to be levied against bad behavior?

Is it some new double-negative tax, levied on activities that Americans cannot not do? Or is it some sort of inverted sales or excise tax on that which is not purchased? (In which case, it would seem that the Constitution must allow us to evade the tax if we explicitly choose not to purchase insurance from companies that don't sell it in our own states.)

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