Marketplace Fairness Act passes the Senate

Today the United States Senate, on  a 70-24 vote, passed the Marketplace Fairness Act. Here is a link to the bill: http://marketplacefairness.org/bill-text/. The MFA will make anyone selling anything on the internet to collect the taxes from the locality that the buyer is from. Current law states that internet retailers only have to collect the taxes in States that they have a brick-and-mortar store in. Also, under current law, we as consumers of e-retailers are suppose to remit the proper taxes to our own locality if tax is not collected.

Amazingly, Amazon.com is one of the major businesses pushing the MFA. Some feel the need for MFA is to level the playing field between e-retailers and brick-and-mortar businesses. If the House passes the bill and President Obama signs it into law it will be an overreach by the Federal Government since the Supreme Court decision in  Quill Corp vs. North Dakota, 1992, where it was determined that States could only collect taxes on e-retailers if that e-retailer had a physical presence in the State.

In citing the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, the Supreme Court struck down North Dakota's attempt to collect taxes via Quill Corp on North Dakota customers. Copy of the SCOTUS decision can be found here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/91-0194.ZO.html. Based on this and other cases cited in the 1992 decision is remarkable that Congress would pass a law that clearly violates the Constitution. Then again they did pass the Affordable Care Act that was only deemed Constitutional because it is consider a tax not to have health insurance.

Hopefully the House of Representatives have read SCOTUS and understand the Commerce Clause and Due Process Clause or we may see yet another piece of legislation passed that violates the Constitution.

Central Planning dealt a blow by Virginia Judge

Yesterday Virginia federal judge ruled that Obamacare's provision to require, by law, that everyone purchase insurance by 2014 is unconstitutional. The reason given by the Virginia judge was that Congress cannot regulate "an individual's failure to purchase health insurance under the pretense that it is an economic activity that affects interstate commerce". The argument being pushed by Sebelius and Holder is that, "as two federal courts have already held, this unfair cost-shifting harms the marketplace. For decades, Supreme Court decisions have made clear that the Constitution allows Congress to adopt rules to deal with such harmful economic effects, which is what the law does – it regulates how we pay for health care by ensuring that those who have insurance don't continue to pay for those who don't."

It's called insurance people. The notion of insurance is simple; one pays for the potential use against needing to use it while another takes on the risk of paying if the use is acted upon. We, as a free society, shall never be dictated to by any form of government to what we have to purchase in order to part of the free society known as the United States of America. Some have pointed to car insurance as a similar instance where one is obligated to purchase a product to drive a car but what they fail to recognize is that one does not need a car to be a citizen of the United States. The Commerce Clause and the Supremacy Clause have been abused by the Federal Government and here is just another liberal interpretation of the Commerce Clause. If the Supreme Court hears this case, or a similar one, and rules that mandating health insurance as a right of citizenship then what is next? Where does it stop?

Perhaps these words will fall on deaf ears because the American Spirit was waned in recent decades. Apathy is the order of the day instead of entrepreneurial spirit. The masses have been trained and enslaved by the federal government with the passing of entitlement programs and bailouts. The health care mandate is a blatant attempt to pave the way for more central planning in all aspects of our lives. Wake up now before it is too late and you are herded into ghettos.