Is not purchasing something ‘commerce’?

[Matt Collins]

Reason Magazine asks the question...
http://reason.com/blog/2010/04/05/the-power-to-regulate-commerce


How does the Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, allow Congress to prohibit the decision to not purchase health insurance—something that involves no commercial transactions, much less commercial transactions across state lines, and which couldn’t possibly involve interstate commerce anyway given that there’s currently no way to buy insurance across state lines.

[fisharmor]

Well, if you can't not buy hemp you grew yourself for your own consumption because it effects the technically nonexistent interstate market for marijuana... then it actually makes sense that you can't not buy health insurance because it will interfere with the nonexistent interstate market for health insurance.

[John Taylor]

Reason Magazine asks the question...
http://reason.com/blog/2010/04/05/the-power-to-regulate-commerce

Matt Collins would tell us what he intended the commerce to mean when he wrote it in 1787, but he actually wrote it during a sleepwalking nightmare caused by typhoid and malaria the night before he set off on an expedition raiding Spanish shipping, and returned only in time to ghost write John Taylor of Caroline's book, Constructions Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated. (http://www.constitution.org/jt/cccv.htm)

Unforunately, discounting Matt's original construction, I'd have to point you all to Wickard v. Filburn, which establishes that if something EFFECTS interstate commerce, even if it is entirely a intrastate, domestic activity, it may be reached by the federal government. This is going to be a massive expansion of federal power, but the court may let it go...

[torchbearer]

congress was to make interstate commerce regular between the states, not to restrict every purchase made.