If We Apply the Supreme Court's Reasoning Elsewhere

If we apply the reasoning the Supreme Court used to uphold health-insurance compulsion elsewhere … then you can't force people to do things but you can tax them as much as you want. If we apply this to military conscription then the 20th-century draft is unconstitutional (it was the individual mandate applied to the military) but the 19th-century draft is constitutional (it was a matter of taxing those men who don't join the army).

The example of the military draft shows that the basic idea behind statism has been part of the U.S. government for decades. What we have here is a glitch in the process of rolling back the fascist era of the mid-20th century. The current tax isn't nearly as bad as 90%+ tax rates on an unpopular minority in the 1950s (earlier discussed here).

On the other hand, whatever happened to “The power to tax is the power to destroy.”?