There is no right to be uninsured

As I have written elsewhere, the lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act are legally frivolous. My former professor Rick Hills, whose scholarship is deeply suspicious of expansive federal power, has called the argument "deeply silly." Most legal scholars think that a Supreme Court decision striking it down would be a blow to the Court's reputation beyond that of either Bush v. Gore or Citizens United.

The problem for the anti-ACA argument is that it's an argument about individual rights dressed up as an argument about the federal government's powers. What opponents of the ACA don't like is that they are being forced by the government to do something or buy something, and they feel that this violates their rights. However, it is impossible, under existing legal precedent, for them to make this argument. Thus, they are forced to argue that the law is beyond Congress's power.

"F" Rick Santorum

In Rick Santorum's victory speech last night after the Alabama and Mississippi primaries, he invoked his belief in the three "F's" that are the centerpiece of his campaign and his identity as a politician: "free people and markets and free economy, and, of course, the integrity of the family and the centrality of faith in our lives."

Freedom, family, and faith. That does seem to sum up the modern Republican Party. But what's striking about that trilogy is the particular conception of freedom, family, and faith that Santorum in particular and Republicans in general seem to hold. Despite all of the blather about finding a true "conservative" candidate, the Republican Party today is not "conservative" -- at least not in the "Burkean" sense of pushing for slow change with a strong status quo bias. Today's Republican Party is quite radical -- indeed, reactionary -- in its goal to push American society back to the 1950s.

And what is good, Phaedrus...

I’m a few weeks late to the party, but I want to put in my two cents about the whole birth control nonsense/”controversy” that arose last month.  But I don’t want to talk about any of the hot-button issues that have been rehashed over and over. I want to talk about what this means for God. (Knowing full well that I’m on my way to getting myself killed on a zebra crossing.)

Let’s back up a few thousand years. A famous philosophical dilemma—and a staple of freshman philosophy classes nationwide—is the so-called “Euthyphro problem,” after Plato’s Euthyphro. In its simplest (and monotheistic) form, the problem asks the following question: Are things good because God commands them, or does God command things because they’re good?