Randy Barnett: Losing Obamacare While Preserving the Constitution

"We won in our effort to preserve the Constitution and, in fact, we moved the ball in a more positive direction," says Georgetown Law's Randy Barnett, one of the legal architects behind the constitutional challenge to Obamacare.

Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion in the 5-to-4 decision upheld Obamacare's individual mandate as an exercise of Congress' tax powers, while simultaneously rejecting the Obama administration's sweeping assertion of federal power under the Commerce Clause. Barnett argues that the chief justice "substituted a less dangerous tax power for a far more dangerous Commerce Clause power." Had the Supreme Court accepted the government's theory of the Commerce Clause, Barnett explains, Congress would have had the power "to do anything it wants with respect to the economy."

A professor of legal theory at Georgetown University Law Center and the author of nine books, including Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (2004), Barnett represented the National Federation of Independent Business in its challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Reason Senior Editor Damon Root recently sat down with Barnett to discuss the Obamacare decision, the "echo chamber" of liberal academia, and why the Constitution is fully consistent with libertarian principles.

Approximately 33 minutes.

Shot by Jim Epstein and Joshua Swain, and edited by Epstein.

Go to http://Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.

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[Altimadark]

Actually, there is. Before government intervention, private insurance had to compete with things like mutual aid societies, which were efficient enough to give a person an entire year of health coverage for but a single day's wages. Once govt intervention started putting restrictions and regulations on the industry, big insurance all but took over.

[glanemann]

What??? So if you only have the government doling out healthcare, who do you turn to for other options when the government fails to run it properly. No one! Since the government has zero competition they can make and do whatever with no quality control since none is needed because it doesn't matter what they do there is no one else doing it.

[sleedolfine15]

It's scary that we only have the one engine left.

[Altimadark]

And yes, the govt did act -- they shrunk the money supply and started putting price caps on food and other necessities, and since those caps put them below the cost of production, we began to have shortages.

[Altimadark]

The FED expanded the money supply by 242.7% thru 1914 to 1920, the first seven years of its existence. fff (dot) org/ freedom/ 0397b (dot) asp

I said banks got money from the FED to make loans, not that the FED made loans to banks. Read.

The GD was not "solved" by WW2; even with the USA at war, there was still rationing going on as before. And if govt spending got us "out" of the depression, we should have gone back in to a depression in 1946 when govt spending plummeted. Instead we prospered.

[Mikael Nilsson]

FED did not expand the money supply. Sorry the great depression was a free market faliure. Milton Friedman and his main work was on the FED and the great depression. His main work stated that the FED perpetuated the depression by not acting.

It did nothing at all. They did not get loans from the FED - they just let them die.

The recovery was earlier than 1946 in 1939 and sovled by govt spending commonly known as WWII

[Altimadark]

And the banks got the extra money to make those loans from the FED.

Compare this to the Panic of 1907 and the Crash of 1921. In both instances, we recovered in about a year, despite the hands-off approach taken by the government; the "free market run amok," as you put it.

In particular, the 1907 crash was even worse than the one in 1929, and yet, with government intervention, we didn't recover from the crash of 1929 until 1946. Thus, the free market cannot be blamed for the Great Depression.

[Mikael Nilsson]

the FED and US mint are the institutions that increase money supply. The bubble occoured by people borowing money from the bank - so the bank could use it to gamble on the stockmarket. That is what caused the bubble.

[Altimadark]

And yes, there is an inflation problem in the USA today, what with the govt borrowing trillions from China to give to big business and big banks under the guise of economic stimulus. Read that again: Government is giving tax dollars and debt dollars to big corporations-- that is, oligopolies.

Government isn't helping oligopolies, not breaking them up, and it sure as anything isn't the free market helping them out when the free market is all but suppressed.

[Altimadark]

Okay, I obviously wasn't clear enough before. The stock market bubble occurred because the government artificially increased the money supply, which in turn prompted investors to make more stock purchases than they would have otherwise. It took some time for people, including banks, to realize that the dollar was being de-valued; once people realized this, they tried pulling out their investments, leading to the crash.

[Mikael Nilsson]

The US dollar has had minal inflation. There really is no point as you dont even understand what a financial crisis is. This crisis has nothing to do with currency. The great depression was a stockmarket bubble - followed by a banking collapse by a bank run. This is basics. The problem with the great depression was that money supply was not extended so - there was no inflation. And there is no inflation problem today either.