wherein seamen aren't all that's distressed

[quarrel]

Paraphrased from the discussion here:

"Wow. It turns out government-mandated healthcare isn't so unconstitutional after all."

"How do you mean?"

"It's already been done. By some of the Founding Fathers, even. Back when the country was about twenty years old, the economy was taking a big hit. The U.S. relied heavily on international trade, but sailors were getting sick and injured in great numbers and couldn't afford treatment. So the federal government passed a law that required any U.S. ship arriving from a foreign port to pay 20¢ per sailor per month or face a $100 fine. That fee paid to build and run Marine Hospitals that treated sailors from those ships for free."

"You're kidding."

"Nope."

"Really? The Founding Fathers?"

"Some of them. John Adams was President and signed it, and Jefferson was also in favor. Both those guys had a pretty good idea what the Constitution intended and what it didn't."

"That's interesting! Still, that act isn't like Obama's health care plan at all."

"Oh. Really."

"Yeah. For one, Obamacare forces private citizens to pay into a service directly. The federal government can't do that. That older act charged companies, which is okay."

"That's only a technicality. The Disabled Seamen act expressly allowed and suggested that ship owners could cover the expense by taking the fee directly from their sailors' pay. It might follow the letter of your alleged the-government-can't-make-citizens-buy-things rule, but both acts violate the spirit and both have the same net result: private citizens pay the cost."

"Well, what about the fact that Obamacare hits everyone? There's no way out of the fine or forced purchase except having no income (or belonging to some minority ethnic groups). This Seamen Act applied to one specific job: international sailors. That's it. If they didn't like being forced to buy insurance, they could do something else."

"There are two problems with that. First, it's not reasonable to expect someone to leave behind a lifetime of experience and training and switch careers cold turkey. You're handwaving away the fact that these sailors actually had very little choice whether to pay, much like with Obamacare. Second, it can't be okay to charge one job but wrong to charge all of them. Think about it. If 'one' is okay but 'all' is wrong, you have to flip from 'okay' to 'wrong' somewhere along the way. Where is that? Is it between one job and two? Four and five? Ninety-seven and ninety-eight? Is it acceptable to force sailors and sous chefs to pay for health insurance but unconstitutional to force sailors and sous chefs and crossing guards? All possible answers are equally silly and unjustifiable. So either it's okay, period, or it's wrong, period. And the Founding Fathers did it, which rules out 'wrong'. Only 'okay' is left."

"But the Seamen Act fees went into a government-run program, not to private companies!"

"Absolutely correct. I have to give you that one. You're actually right. But how does this addresses the idea of whether it's okay for the federal government to force citizens to buy a service?
"You know, some of comments I see here are the result of people pretending to understand constitutional issues. While I may not be the biggest fan of our current SCOTUS, they are extremely bright people who are able to understand what was what. If arguments such as yours form the basis of a constitutional challenge, I fear you are not going to like the result.
"Here’s the good news – there are some very valid Constitutional challenges to be lodged against Obamacare- many of which have a very decent chance of succeeding, particularly with this court. The problem is you, with all due respect, are hitting none of them.
"If you took a few moments to read through these comments, you will find some where the commenter disagrees with my perspective on the law discussed in this piece and provide[s] compelling arguments to support their disagreement. Read some of them so you better understand the real issues."[bold text not paraphrased -Q]

Things understandably get a bit testy after that. There are conflicting assertions about whether international sailors were Merchant Marines at the time, and thus military personnel rather than private citizens. There were jibes that people got their entire legal theory from Wikipedia. There were admonishments that people were not bothering to look up basic facts with five-minute Wikipedia or Google searches before attempting to contribute. There was an "all your counterpoints were addressed in the Federalist Papers two hundred twenty years ago"; that one was funny. After that it gets into various nitty-gritty squabbles over the stark differences in Jefferson's and Adams's philosophies and actions.

LOGIC & PHILOSOPHY MIDTERM TEST

1. Bill says he's thirsty. Sara gives him a Coke. Bill says he doesn't like Coke. Sara takes her Coke back.

Q: What five classic errors did Sara commit?

That's pretty much how my brain felt when I came up from the original thread for air. I'm reluctant to dive back in.

Game designer Soren Johnson once tweeted, "I love history because it is like a fractal - whatever you want to know about, you can always zoom in for more detail." That's what I had here. The depth was endless. Endless and the nigh opposite of helpful. I suppose that sort of thing is appealing to people like Mr. Johnson and the Founding Fathers, who are magical aliens with giant, perfect space brains ["No we aren't." -J. Madison]. I suppose it's appealing to people with "powerful, flexible minds" (as someone I know put it), people who prefer a world where whether you're correct depends less on whether you're actually correct than it does on whether you can imagine yourself correct (and then convince people). Me? I prefer true things to be true and false things to be false. I don't understand how believing that, say, that chair over there really is red, or the Foo Act of 19XX really is or is not legal, logically forces me to believe free will does not exist. I detest the idea that I can pick any stance I want on any issue I want and be right if I connect the right dots. That's doublethink. That's Bizarro world. I don't want to live there.