Good Historical Precedent for the Mandate

I've had a couple of posts up recently on misuses of American history to justify political or ideological positions today. The other day I wrote specifically about a liberal abuse of history that attempted to justify the health insurance mandate (which readers know I have major reservations about, despite my strong support for other elements of health reform). This morning, I noticed that Brad DeLong links to Paul O'Rourke's much, much better example of historical precedent for an insurance mandate (DeLong was also the source of the less convincing example I critiqued earlier). The legislation in question comes from the early Republic - the Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen, of July 1798 (the Adams administration). The act laid a tax on all privately employed sailors, collected by their employers, of 20 cents a month (a lump sum payroll tax, essentially) to provide hospital care for the sailors. O'Rourke provides the full text of the law. Of course there are some differences - there is still no "mandate" per se (then again, there was nothing to mandate, as there was no health insurance at the time) - but the more fundamental point is the tax imposed on all sailors, whether they want the hospital care or not. This is the same mechanism that is being used to implement the mandate today.

I don't think this answers all the Constitutional questions. After all, I actually went in to the text of the Constitution to debunk the last attempt to justify the mandate, which I don't do here. I would think this one would be justified with the Article 1, Section 8 power to lay taxes and appropriate funds for the general welfare. One argument I could make is that this is really more of an example of a public option than it is a mandate (after all, no one is forced to purchase anything, they are simply taxed and provided a social service - just like Medicare). I think that's a valid argument to make about how far we should take this historical precedent. Nevertheless, I still think it is important to acknowledge, because this example is a lot sturdier constitutionally and as an analog to the current situation than the last one shared by DeLong about the militias.

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Some people talk as if the Constitution were just the Articles of Confederation with lower voting thresholds. All significant additional powers granted to the federal government are downplayed. We spin this story that the commerce clause and "necessary and proper" and the General Welfare clause are inventions of FDR in the 1930s, or at the very earliest perhaps Progressives and trustbusters a few decades earlier. This simply wasn't the case. The Constitution is not another Articles of Confederation and we need to take that seriously.