Pisaturo: Obama Invests in People to Own Them

Ron Pisaturo has just made an excellent post entitled Policies of Obama Match His Socialist Rhetoric.  The very best part of this post is the final paragraphs where he discusses Obama's idea of investing in people so that government will own the productivity of the most productive Americans:

When Obama speaks of the government ‘investing’, he is of course perverting the meaning of the word; he is really spending wealth confiscated from others. But there is a sinister way in which his use of the word “investing’ is revealing and apt: the government is ‘investing’ in contrast to ‘lending’. When a creditor makes a loan, the creditor obtains a promise to repay the loan with interest; in contrast, when an investor makes an investment, the investor obtains ownership and a share of the profits.

Since, according to Obama, the government ‘invests’ in you—by paying for your schooling, etc.—the government expects not a repayment of a loan to you, but rather a share of the profits in you. For the most productive among us, that share is now more than half of all that you make; and that share is growing as the government’s socialist/fascist agenda expands. Moreover, the government—in keeping with the fascist version of socialism—expects in effect to own the majority of ‘voting stock’ in the ‘business’ of your life, deciding what you must or must not produce, whom you must hire or fire or work for, to whom you must sell, where you must and must not be located, and what methods of production you must and must not use. That is, it is ‘society’, not you, that owns your productive life.

Paradoxically, Obama and other Leftist government officials have recently been pushing to forgive loans to students for college and graduate school; such loans now total a trillion dollars. But if education via government funding is so crucial to an individual’s success, as Obama claims, why is the government willing to let students get off without paying? The answer is that student loans are not socialist/fascist enough for the Left. These loans entail too much individual choice (to request the loan), individual responsibility (to repay the loan), and individual justice (to be responsible to repay only one’s own loan and not the loans to others).

The Leftists think the government can afford to forgive student loans, because the government still has its student ‘investments’. Whenever any particular student in public elementary school or high school—or, for that matter, any particular individual who does not even go to public school—becomes very successful, the socialist/fascist government can claim its lion’s share of the profit on that successful ‘investment’ by taxing that individual’s wealth. One such very successful investment can pay for thousands of failures.

Obama wants to make even more ‘investments’ in us that we can’t refuse. His brazen socialist/fascist rhetoric is part of a campaign for even more ownership of Americans.

These are very perceptive comments and they help us to see deep into the evil mind and heart of the socialist beast that fully intends to be our slave-master.  When Obama uses the word invest, he means it as in a commonly used sense from medieval times:  Obama is investing the castle, as in subjugating the castle.

Do we Americans want productive self-managing Americans to be subjected to work slavery, or do we still have some appreciation for hard work, achievement, and the right to earn a living?  Do we want Americans to either be dependent upon the government beast or to be slaves to the government beast?  Make no mistake -- Obama wants us all to be cast as members of either the dependent or the slave group.  It is unacceptably degrading to be either.

Somebody Else Built My Business!

Speaking in Roanoke, Virginia on Friday, Obama said:



Obama also said:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

 If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

My response:

Somebody else invested the start-up money to buy laboratory equipment.  Somebody else had an income of only $10,000 in all of year 1.  Somebody else paid for a high deductible health plan for myself, my wife, and my three daughters.  Somebody else worked 80-hour weeks.  Somebody else acted as an unpaid tax collector for the federal, state, and local governments.  Somebody else paid real estate taxes and personal property taxes on my laboratory facility and equipment.  Somebody else trained employee after employee.  Somebody else developed thousands of customized materials analysis plans to solve my customers materials problems.  Somebody else slept on a cot into the night to be around to start up one more analysis or two through the night.  Somebody else worked many a 36-hour stretch straight through to meet a deadline.  Somebody else wrote thousands of analytical reports.

Somebody else paid my employees and only took their own pay when income was sufficient to provide it.  Somebody else guaranteed the laboratory lease.  Somebody else took the risk of being sent to jail for the possible violation of some one of thousands of regulations that cannot all be known and understood by any small business owner.  Someone else had to fire the occasional mistaken hire who could not perform his job.  Someone else went with less than a week of vacation time year after year after year.  Someone else worked weekend and holiday after weekend and holiday.

I sure am grateful to that Somebldy Else, even if I was mistaken in thinking it was me.  Now that I know otherwise, I am asking that Somebody Else to step forward and be acknowledged.

But, one thing I am really certain about is this:  I do not owe governments a penny more than they have already received from me and my business.  The first 30% of their spending used on legitimate government functions was worth my while paying, but the remainder was a giant rip-off.  Any penny more that I give government today is money they use to make my life and my family's lives just that much harder.  Much of that money is actually spent to violate more and more of our sovereign individual rights.

It is a good thing that Obama is so blatantly stating what this upcoming election is really about.  He is right that his vision of how our society and our government should operate is very different from that of those of his opposition who believe in the American Principle of a very limited, constitutional government whose only legitimate function is the protection of individual rights.

Those of us who believe in the American Principle readily acknowledge that we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to those Americans who came before us and gave us a government that was at one time limited in scope and largely protective of individual liberty.  We are also grateful for those many productive Americans who made our society wealthy, robust, innovative, founded on mutual trust, reasonably benevolent, and comparatively independent-minded.  We have long had a society that expected Americans to be self-managers of their own lives and to live their lives responsibly.  There are tremendous benefits to all of us from this.  This is a society in which people have largely been able to reap many benefits from their accomplishments and productive work, while providing rich benefits to all of the rest of us in our society.

Our society has largely been based on a robust and rich private sector in which individuals were free to choose their own values and to associate freely with others of their own choice to pursue those values.  We have been a trader society which operates on the principle of voluntary exchanges of ideas, goods, and services.  I, for instance, could not operate without the many vendors who make and supply replacement parts for my laboratory equipment.  I am very grateful to them for offering me that critical service.  But, I also pay them well for providing that equipment and the replacement parts.  My customers pay for my services because I identity the causes of their materials problems and can often suggest how they can prevent the problem.  They are able to make more money because of the service I provide them.  But, our largely private sector society of free trade and associations provides the very mechanisms that allow us to acknowledge in appropriate ways the debts we have to others who supply us with valuable ideas, goods, and services.

Obama wants to eliminate this voluntary trade and association.  He wants to kill the very mechanisms we have for acknowledging the value of the ideas, goods, and services that others in our society offer us.  He wants hordes of government central planners to choose our values for us and impose them upon us using the full force of government.  He says that because we have reaped some benefits from others and from having government, that we owe it to government to build it up even more.  This Obama prescription is the equivalent of the argument that if taking one aspirin for a headache is good, then taking 100 aspirins for that headache is better.  Or if drinking 8 ounces of water now is good, then pouring 10 gallons of water down your throat now is better.  There are many things which have an appropriate level, which when exceeded begin to cause harm and when greatly exceeded cause great harm.  Obama's argument is shear sophistry.  It is wifty logic.

I see that the spell checker does not recognize wifty.  OK, Obama has a great propensity for ditzy logic, which unfortunately works for many Americans today.  Apparently, that is the outcome of government-run schools that want to produce suitable subjects for a socialist tyrannical government.  The biggest ditz of them all, the perfect product of this educational system promoting socialism, is Obama.

Good is done when two or more people agree upon a voluntary exchange.  This may be in business or it may be in a non-commercial endeavor.  What is good for each of us is very different and we work out the complex evaluations of good in accordance with our personal values in the private sector.  While limited government is essential for the purpose of securing our individual rights, larger government can only compromise the individual values of most of us most of the time.  As government grows beyond its legitimate rights protecting function, it necessarily becomes an individual rights violator.  Government cannot do the complex calculus which 310 million Americans do in living and managing their own lives on a completely voluntary basis with others in all things with which government is not involved.  Of course, that assumes that government would even want to do good for each of us if it could.  The history of big governments in all times and places indicates that they do not want to do such good.  Good government, like good doctors, first does no harm.

The Missing Jobs in June 2012 are Unchanged from June 2010

This is the monthly update on the real unemployment situation in the USA based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics June 2012 Household Survey Jobs Data.  The data I will use will not be seasonally adjusted, so we will need to compare June of this year with the unemployment of June 2010 and June 2011 to see if any jobs recovery has occurred.  We will also calculate the number of missing jobs based upon the percentage of the jobs wanted in January 2000 relative to the working age civilian population available for work.  This excludes people in jail or in institutions for those in ill health.

The recent history of missing jobs is given in the following chart:

The number of missing jobs in June 2012 is slightly lower than the number of missing jobs in June 2011, but it is slightly higher than the number of missing jobs in June 2010.  Just as with every other month so far this year, if we compare the number of missing jobs to the same month a year and two years earlier, we find that essentially nothing has changed.

In contrast, the usual unemployment rate of June 2010 was 9.62%.  It fell to 9.32% by June 2011 and still further to the June 2012 rate of 8.43%.  But, this number means little due to the ever-increasing number of discouraged job seekers.  The number of the reported unemployed fell from June 2010 to June 2011 and again to June 2012.  The number of people employed also grew from June to June to June in that time.  However, the population of working age civilians also grew, so that the 12.80% of missing jobs in June 2010 had actually increased by June 2011 to 13.30%, before falling in June 2012 to almost the same percentage as in June 2010 at 12.74%.  A 0.06% decrease in the number of missing jobs in the last two years is no job recovery at all.  This has been the story consistently for the last two and half years.

The policies of the Obama administration are so wrongheaded that they have done great damage to the private sector economy and kept companies from hiring.  Government can do little to effectively increase hiring, but it is excellently capable of destroying jobs and keeping new jobs from being created.  Obama and his Democratic Socialist Party leadership have been working overtime finding ways to make the future ever more uncertain for business and in making labor so expensive that business cannot afford to hire.

John C. Goodman, CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis, recently testified in the House of Representatives that ObamaUncaringTax will increase the cost of an employee by $6/hour.  The EPA is causing sizable increases in our electricity costs and a decrease in electricity reliability, which will cause great harm to many businesses and will reduce the money individuals can spend on other goods and services.  Many state governments are contributing to this problem with their mandates that green energy replace fossil fuels in the electricity supply of their state.  Despite a huge supply of oil and gas in the United States, the Obama administration has done everything it can to prevent the development of new fields on federal land and offshore.  The Dodd-Frank law has created great uncertainty and it has kept financial institutions from loaning to small businesses.  Obama and his union henchmen have interfered with employer-employee relations to the detriment of business.  The looming taxes of the ObamaUncaringTax will take a huge toll, which include a tax surcharge on individuals with higher incomes and on corporations, in addition to the penalty taxes.  This punitive taxation of higher income individuals is not enough for Obama and he wants to eliminate their low percentage decrease part of the Bush tax cuts.  All this is happening in the face of the start of the Baby Boomer retirements and the continued collapse of the housing market.

Of course business is not hiring enough people to get Americans back to work with a jobs recovery to this never-ending recession.  With Obama destroying the business climate, nothing will change and nothing will change Obama.  He is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist.  He is fundamentally anti-business, with the exception of those who generously support his campaign fund.  Even then many of those companies have found him unbelievably treacherous.  The only hope for our economy and for Americans who want to be able to earn a living is the replacement of Obama with Romney.

Back-Radiation and the Highly Fallacious Kiehl-Trenberth Energy Budget

The usual greenhouse gas calculation such as is offered up by the various Trenberth diagrams is highly dominated by the radiative transport of energy in the Earth’s atmosphere.  It leads to an unreasonable result for the situation I am going to describe here.

But first, my approach to the back-radiation problem was always to show that it was unrealistic on many levels.  One cannot make a net gain of heat energy in a surface by returning a portion of the energy lost from a surface to it.  This is especially true of any process that is said to lose half of the surface emitted energy to space immediately and to only re-absorb some part of half of the energy that was returned to the surface.  I went further and explained that only a small fraction of the energy emitted as radiation from the surface was re-emitted as radiation from an absorbing water or CO2 molecule.  With just these considerations alone, the upper limit on once radiated energy from the surface which is re-absorbed by the surface would be:

(0.5) f,

where the 0.5 is the half of any IR absorbing molecule radiation which was not radiated into space and is radiated toward the surface.  The fraction f is the fraction of the IR energy lost by the surface and absorbed by an IR absorbing molecule which is re-emitted before collisions have dissipated the energy absorbed.  The fraction f is much less than one because most often the IR absorbing molecule undergoes collisions with other molecules and transfers much of the IR absorbed energy to other molecules before re-emission occurs.  These other molecules are rarely water or CO2 or other IR emitting molecules, so that energy is not returned to the surface as IR radiation.  Thus much of the surface emitted IR radiation is dissipated to the 99.97% of the atmosphere molecules which are nitrogen, oxygen, or argon and are not IR emitters.

Let us estimate the value of f.  At sea level, the mean gas velocity is 459 m/s, the mean free path or distance between collisions is only 6.6 x 10^-8 m or 66 nm, and the collision frequency is 6.9 billion/s.  At an altitude of about 4000 m, the radiative transfer of energy competes about evenly with transfer by collisions.  At 4000 m altitude, the frequency of gas molecule collisions is about 4.4 billion/s.  We can use the equivalency of energy transfer by radiation and gas molecule collisions at the 4000 meter altitude to estimate the fraction of energy transfer by radiation of the total of energy transferred by radiation plus gas molecule collisions. At sea level, energy transfer by radiation is equivalent to about 4.4 x 109 collisions per second, so the fraction of energy transferred by radiation is about 4.4/(4.4 + 6.9) = 0.39 of the total by gas molecule collisions and radiation.  This suggests that about 1.5 times as much energy is transferred by gas collisions as by radiation at sea level.

So at this point, the upper limit on IR radiation emitted from the surface which can be returned to the surface and absorbed by it is about:

(0.5) (0.39) = 0.195

It also has to be remembered that this is the upper limit for that portion of the IR radiation from the surface which can be absorbed by an IR-absorbing molecule such as water or CO2.  Much of the surface-emitted IR radiation is of such wavelengths that no IR-absorbing molecule can absorb it in the first place.  If one takes this fact into account, the 0.195 upper limit is a hugely generous upper limit.

But, it does not follow that simply because this much back-radiated IR is incident upon the surface that it will be absorbed by the surface.  During the roughly 8 hours of a day when the surface is warming under increasing sunlight and with a 2-hour lag for warming the ground, water, or air in a vicinity, none of this radiation may be absorbed, except when a cloud casts a shadow on a part of the area or at such points under the shadow of a tree of some such object.  The absorbing ground has to be cooler than the ground from which the photon was emitted and subsequently absorbed by an IR-absorbing molecule in the atmosphere.  During the remaining cooling hours of the day, roughly 16 hours, the surface is more likely to absorb such back-radiated energy.  As a mean value for re-absorption of IR back-radiation over the daily cycle, the value of 0.95 is often used.  I believe that value is much too high.

Let us look at one of the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budgets for a moment:

According to this diagram, 67/ 342 = 0.196 of the incoming solar radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere.  77/342 = 0.225 is reflected by clouds and aerosols.  The surface reflects 30/(30 + 168) = 0.152 of the solar radiation incident upon the surface.  Thermals cooling the surface dissipate 24/168 = 0.143 of this incident radiation.  Let us note that the surface emits a flux of 390 W/m^2 of IR radiation and according to this diagram the atmosphere has absorbed a highly efficient 324 W/m^2 of this or 83.1% of this.  Yet, above I showed in very simple terms that 19.5% is more than the upper limit by far of the amount of IR radiation that the atmosphere can return, which is not from IR-absorbing gas molecules that are substantially cooler than the Earth's surface.

Now let us consider a midday calculation of the surface and do so where there is no cloud cover and where it is so dry that there is no evapotranspiration.  What kind of surface temperature will we have.  Since there are no clouds and I think clouds are the better part of the summed cloud and aerosol effect, let us assume the aerosol effect alone is 0.08.  The midday radiation incident on the upper atmosphere is 1367 W/m^2.  Note that at midday, the incident radiation path length through the atmosphere is shorter than it is for the average daily values normally used, so losses in the atmosphere should be lower than these numbers.  I will use them nonetheless.

The radiation upon the ground is then:

(1 - 0.196) (1- 0.08) (1 - 0.152) (1 - 0.143) 1367 W/m^2 = 734.8 W/m^2

The ground temperature is then found from:

734.8 W/m^2 = ε σ T^4,  ε = 0.95

T = 341.8 K = 68.6̊C = 155.5̊F

But if you believe that the upper limit amount of back-radiation is 95% absorbed by the surface, then the incident radiation is:

(734.8 W/m^2) (1 + 0.195(0.95)) = 870.9 W/m^2

T = 356.6 K = 83.4̊C = 182.2̊F

Now this is clearly much too hot and implies that even the addition of this upper limit of back-radiation which is much smaller than the back-radiation in the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram and energy budget is not physical.  In reality, air convection or thermal effects are more important in cooling the surface than the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget allows for.  The same is true of water evaporation, transport, and condensation effects.

Note that I did not follow the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram in subtracting the emitted radiation that corresponds to the Earth’s surface temperature.  They subtract 390 W/m^2 and add back in 324 W/m^2 of back-radiation for their mean daily calculation.  This would imply that if we had no atmosphere with IR absorbing gases in it, then there would be no back-radiation, so the total energy budget would look like:

(168 - 24 - 78 - 390) W/m^2 = -324 W/m^2,

which is nonsense.  Of course you might say that the thermals would be different and if I have no absorbing IR gases, then I certainly do not have water evaporation and movement.  This perhaps is a muddled situation.

So let us consider the equivalent calculation technique for an isolated black body radiator in space with incident energy flux of Ii and an emitted radiation of Ie.  But Ii = Ie, so then this approach would have us fallaciously conclude that

Ii - Ie = 0 = σ T^4 and T = 0 K.

The temperature of the isolated black (or gray) body is determined by the incident radiation on it.  The basic approach of the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram to radiation is nonsense.  The energy budget is a farce based on bad physics.  Indeed, when challenged on this issue, many proponents of man-made catastrophic global warming back down and say that the General Circulation Models are calculated primarily as air and water vapor circulation models and are not really consistent with the several variations of the Kiehl-Trenberth Energy Budget.  Yet it is such fallacious energy budgets that the public has been fed as the basis for the claim that there are substantial effects on the Earth's surface temperature due to man's emissions of CO2.  Government websites have been full of these energy budgets, as have college classes.  For their part, the range of results in the GCM computer models is too large to be consistent with the idea that climate science is settled and everyone agrees that it is understood.

ObamaCare: No Due Process, Unconstitutional Tax

It is said that the 5-4 Supreme Court decision that ObamaCare is constitutional in NFIB v. Sebelius provided that the penalty for not buying the expensive health insurance plan mandated by the government is redesignated a tax, is not entirely bad because by a 7-2 decision the court decided that ObamaCare was unconstitutional under a basis provided by either the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause.  It is now well-established that there are some limits to the powers granted the government by these other clauses of the Constitution, which had been the primary basis for the Obama administration claim that ObamaCare was constitutional.  The law was held to be constitutional as re-written by Chief Justice Roberts.

Nonetheless, the Supreme Court declared a highly unconstitutional law to be constitutional, as it has long had a tendency to do.  It has violated the fundamental American Principle that forms the foundation for the purpose and function of the government which the Constitution mandated as the will of the People.  The Constitution written and signed by the members of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and which went into effect after 9 states had approved it in 1789, was a reformation of the government of the United States of America.

The United States of American began with the Declaration of Independence, signed 2 July 1776 and announced publicly on 4 July 1776.  The Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that every individual has an equal and inalienable (or sovereign) right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  It was understood that these individual rights were not granted by government and that they resided in each individual man by virtue of his nature.  Individual human rights included the right to property.  The most important property each man held was his own body and mind and his labor.  The Declaration of Independence decreed that any government that violated an individual's rights was illegitimate.  Government should have as its purpose and sole function the protection of individual rights.

This American Principle of highly limited government devoted to the protection of the rights of the individual, was the basis for the government mandated by the People in the Constitution for the same United States of America which took effect in 1789.  The continuation of our government in a new form did not result in an abrogation of the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, which ended the American Revolutionary War and created a number of agreements which the Great Britain had still not fulfilled in 1789.  President Washington continued to try to hold the British to those requirements of the Treaty of Paris.  We were not a new country in 1789 and we still owed our existence and our birth as a nation to the Declaration of Independence.  While the powers given to the government by the Constitution were thought by many to be so restricted and limited that the government could not pose any threat to individual rights, most Americans worried so much about some future infringements that they demanded the Bill of Rights as a condition of their approving the Constitution.  The People then thought the Constitution with its Bill of Rights was a clear mandate for a government that could not violate our sovereign individual rights.

It was well-understood that government, while needed to protect individual rights, was also very inclined to add to its powers until government became the primary violator of individual rights.  Such is the case in the United States of America today.  The federal courts have neglected the context in making decisions of law generally and constitutional law in particular that is provided by the foundational  American Principle.  Without the repeated and constant guidance of that principle, long strings of court cases were decided and precedent was established which provided government with more and more of the additional powers it desired, but which caused government to become the primary violator of individual rights in the USA today.  Such unguided and out-of-context decisions greatly expanded the powers of government by expanding the scope of the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the power to tax without regard to the effect upon our individual rights.  As a result, Congress was under the impression when it passed ObamaCare that these clauses of the Constitution gave it the power to do almost anything it chose to do.

Precedent is important and helps people to understand the law and its interpretations and to prevent sudden interpretation changes.  This is true only if those precedents were established in a manner consistent with the American Principle, however.  In our case decisions too often have not been consistent.  Any interpretation of the Constitution or of any law deemed to be constitutional, must be consistent with the requirement that legitimate government cannot violate individual rights.  It is the American Principle that makes the United States of America exceptional among nations and which legitimately causes a freedom-loving People to admire what they once had here in the United States of America.


ObamaCare: Due Process Failure

From early in the legislative process to create ObamaCare, the American People have been deprived of due process in this law which will have very drastic effects upon our lives and the exercise of their rights.  I have discussed many of these in the past and the present 5-4 Supreme Court decision has added to the list of due process failures.  The following is a list of many of these due process failures:

• The name of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a misrepresentation of the act.  It was always clear it would make health care more expensive for almost everyone and that the quality of healthcare would suffer for most people.  The act was a fraud perpetrated upon the People, so they were less likely to bring appropriate pressure upon their elected representatives to oppose its passage and protect their individual rights.
• The principal effect of ObamaCare was to turn ownership of every individual's body and the mental health of their minds to the collective in the most direct and obvious violation of individual rights.  The intent of the law was to force individuals to buy a more expensive and comprehensive insurance policy than most need as an individual so that free-riders could not game the government intrusion into the health care system that already controlled half of that marketplace.  It was also so that a very small fraction of people with pre-existing conditions could get health insurance.  But, neither the plight of a few people with pre-existing conditions nor some free-riders, could justify any constitutional judgment that ObamaCare was an act of legitimate government.  Clearly, most people were going to suffer a real and important loss of their ability to manage their own lives, decide how to protect their health, and were going to suffer a loss of happiness while forced to wait in pain for long periods to see overworked, underpaid, and angry doctors whose medical skills and equipment were going to suffer degradations relative to the free market alternative.
• Each of our elected representatives and the President have an obligation recognized in their oath of office to protect the Constitution.  They are clearly in violation of this oath every time they vote for or sign into law a bill which they have not read.  This is a major violation of due process and should be recognized as such.  The votes of any Senator or Representative who did not read the bill and properly judge whether it was constitutional or not are invalid votes.  This being the case, the bill did not pass either the House or the Senate legitimately and with due process.
• Many additional effects of the law were misrepresented. It was claimed over and over that if one liked one's present health care insurance plan, one could keep it.  The law clearly did not allow this.  It was said over and over that the panels that would decide what medical care would be provided to whom, were not Death Panels, and yet these same panels are declaring that many life-saving operations previously provided to those 70 and over will no longer be offered or provided.  The same will be true of newborn infants.  Life or death will be decided by these panels, but we cannot recognize that function!  Fraud once again was practiced to ease the passage of this law, which barely did so.  Perhaps some Senators and Representatives were fooled by these fallacious claims and would not have voted for the bill had they known.
• Tax bills must originate from the House of Representatives.  This bill is full of new taxes, even prior to the Supreme Court ruling that the penalty is really a tax.  This bill did not originate in the House.  H.R. 3590 was a bill called Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009 which was passed by the House, whose name and content was completely changed by Senator Harry Reid and turned into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  This was a transparent violation of the Origination Clause requiring revenue bills to come from the House.  Chief Justice Roberts chose to take no notice of this constitutional violation, though the dissenting opinion did note it.
• ObamaCare is essentially a huge outline of a bill which ceded the responsibility of the Congress to write bills in large part to agencies under the Executive Branch who are writing or have written thousands of pages of rules and regulations to implement ObamaCare which Congress has not reviewed in fulfillment of its constitutional duty.  These Executive Branch agencies and cabinet departments are not constitutional allowed to establish laws.
• Tax laws cannot be reviewed by the Federal Courts until the taxes in them take effect.  This case was reviewed by the Supreme Court and allowed to stand even as that court claimed that the huge penalties of the bill were taxes.  Those taxes are not yet being assessed, so this bill should not have been reviewed under due process at this time.  The fact that the decision was rendered is in direct contradiction of the decision that the penalty is a tax.
• The bill claims the penalties for not buying the government mandated health payment plans are not taxes.  The American people were told by many Senators, Congressmen, and the President that they were not taxes.  Indeed, the purpose of a tax is to raise revenue, while that of a penalty is to compel behavior.  This compelling of behavior was the aim of the ObamaCare bill.  Justice Roberts says the tax is not high enough to force anyone to buy ObamaCare health insurance, so it does not compel behavior, so it is not a penalty.  This is a tortured viewpoint.  Since the majority of the Supreme Court now says they are taxes, even if this bill had been passed by Congress and signed into law under due process, that due process would have been forfeit now.  The Supreme Court is not authorized by the Constitution to create new legislation on its own as it just did.  Laws are made in Congress, which has the first pass on deciding whether a law is constitutional or not.  Then the President has an opportunity to veto a bill if he thinks it is unconstitutional.

ObamaCare is Now an Unconstitutional Tax

Chief Justice Roberts and the four radical leftists on the Supreme Court redesignated the penalty for not buying a particular prescribed government health "insurance" policy at an elevated cost largely dictated by conditions of inclusion set by the government to be a tax.  This tax is a direct tax and has not been apportioned among the states as required by Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution:

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

This means that any direct tax can only be levied upon a state in proportion to its population.  Presumably an income tax would be based on all income in the U.S. and each state would be required to provide a tax in proportion to its state population.  If the federal government decided that tax on income was to be 20%, then the tax to be collect would be (0.2) I, where I is the total national income.  If a particular state has a population which is equal to 2% of the national population, then it has to provide income tax revenue in its state of (0.02)(0.2) I to the federal government.  This makes it constitutionally impossible for the federal government to levy a progressive direct income tax and it means the tax in a given state will not be in the same proportion as income in that state.

The 16th Amendment seems to most Americans today to have created an exception to this injunction against direct taxes for the specific case of income taxes.  This was not so, because at the time this amendment was passed, income was considered to be, and was affirmed as such by the Supreme Court in Eisner v. Macomber in 1918 and in Merchants Loan and Trust v. Smietanka in 1921 to be the profit a corporation made.  In earlier decisions, Pollock v. Farmer's Loan and Trust (1895) and Brushaber v. Union Pacific Rail Road (1916), the Supreme Court had ruled that to be an indirect tax, income had to be separated from its source.  If a corporation was paid rent money for a building it owned, it had to subtract its expenses for renting the building and this established separation from the source of the income.  The tax on the profit from the rental was an indirect tax.

The rulings of the Supreme Court make it clear that a so-called income tax levied upon an individual's salary, wages, tips, commissions, and bonuses are direct taxes and are prohibited by the Constitution.  These direct payments belong to the individual as a matter of right, because his labor is his property by right.  Despite such payments not having been considered to be income in 1913 when the Income Tax Amendment was approved, the Supreme Court has never since these early cases taken up the protection of the individual right to payment for one's labor.  The government now taxes these payments without separation and without subtracting expenses in clear violation of the individual right to one's own labor and its fruits.  One might say the Supreme Court did for the income tax what it has just done for ObamaCare.  It found a limited way for it to be started and then never re-examined those situations it said were unconstitutional.

In a completely specious argument, Chief Justice Roberts claimed the penalty was a tax since it was not levied on most people.  The fraction of the population upon which a tax is levied has nothing at all to do with its being direct or indirect. 

Justice Roberts said that a tax that forced Americans to buy the government prescribed health insurance would be unconstitutional.  He said a penalty high enough to do so would be unconstitutional.  But, he says since the present tax is too low to compel Americans to buy health insurance, it is constitutional.  If this law is not soon repealed, it will fail because too many Americans will pay the tax rather than buy the more expensive health payment plan.  Future Congresses will then raise the tax until individuals are compelled to buy the health payment plan and then by Roberts' decision the law will be unconstitutional.

But will the Supreme Court actually review such a law and declare it unconstitutional?  Based on the precedent of the income tax, no.  But the reasoning offered by Roberts and the majority is very specious and very flimsy.  It begs to be reversed.  It is no wonder the dissenting Justices are very unhappy about this decision.  This decision has brought great disdain upon the Supreme Court majority by those who value reason and expect it to be valued by the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court has once again failed to protect the sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.