The 1798 “Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen:” Yet another “progessive” irrelevancy
As Tom Woods points out on his blog, advocates of Obamacare have dug up a 1798 federal statute that, they say, shows that the original understanding of the Constitution is broad enough to authorize federal health care programs. The statute authorized creation of federal hospitals for sailors.
After I entered a brief response to his posting, Mr. Woods queried me about the statute, and I gave him a detailed response. You can read it here.
The bottom line is that the statute was based on an earlier British enactment, which had been accepted by the American colonists before the Revolution as a valid regulation of imperial commerce. This is because governance of navigation (including sailors) had long been considered part of the regulation of commerce.
The statute is irrelevant to federal health care programs that go beyond providing for those working in foreign or interstate transportation.
Even if the statute seemed relevant, a very important caution is in order: When you are reconstructing the original force of the unamended Constitution, the key is the meaning to the ratifiers when they approved the document between 1787 and 1790. An enactment a decade later by a very different group of people not focused on constitutional meaning, in very different circumstances and acting under very different incentives is just not very good evidence of what the ratifiers understood the Constitution to mean several years earlier.
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2 Comments on The 1798 “Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen:” Yet another “progessive” irrelevancy
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Is it a “tax” or not a “tax”? The original understanding | Our American Constitution on
Sun, 11th Sep 2011 9:48 am
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Yet another “progressive” argument for an unlimited Commerce Power doesn’t add up | Our American Constitution on
Sun, 23rd Oct 2011 5:40 am
[...] For example, if Parliament imposed a very steep tariff on French clothing designed to help British textile manufacturers by pricing French clothing out of the British Empire, that tariff was a regulation of commerce. It was not a “tax” because it was actually designed to stop French goods and, if it worked as intended, would not raise significant revenue. (If it raised anything, the funds generated probably would be less than the cost of administering the tariff.) Similarly, if Parliament imposed a levy on ships entering a particular harbor and dedicated the entire proceeds to improvements in that harbor (or for other navigation purposes), the levy was a regulation of commerce, not a tax. Thus, the now-famous 1798 law by which Congress imposed a levy to fund health care for sick and disa… [...]
[...] In past posts, I’ve reported on a misinterpretation of the Necessary and Proper Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 18) that was based on a failure to research the meaning of the Post Office Clause (I-8-7). I’ve also reported on misuse of an early sailors’ health care law to justify Obamacare. [...]
