This is the final installment of a 3-part post to the blog referenced in the preceding two installments:
I wrote in conclusion:
What gets lost in the "General Welfare" [reference to U.S. Constitution] discussion is the obvious conclusion that the Founding Fathers would not have gone to the bother of enumerating the seventeen, limited [arguably, twenty-two,], delegated, and discrete powers of the Congress, leaving all the rest to the States and the people, if they, in fact, intended to give the Congress carte blanche power to pass whatever laws it deemed fit to minister to the "general welfare" of the people.
In the following video Judge Andrew Napolitano comments on these specific, enumerated powers delegated to Congress. In summing up his commentary, he asks: "Is freedom a reality or a myth? Wasn't the Constitution written to define and to restrain the government?" And, he goes on to say, "We now have a federal government whose only self-acknowledged limitation is whatever it can get away with."
In another video, Judge Napolitano commented on the question: Is it constitutional for Congress to regulate health care? He says, "When I put that very question to Congressman James Cliburn, who is the #3 ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives...he said to me, 'Most of what we do down here isn't even mentioned in the Constitution, but we do it anyway.' Unfortunately, that is the attitude of so many members of Congress. It is not constitutional. Health care is not mentioned in the constitution. The Congress will claim that, when you go to your doctor to have a pain looked at in your belly or to take medication for your blood pressure, that that's commerce, that that's a commercial transaction...as opposed to the practice of medicine. So, the Congress will say that just as the Commerce Clause was written so that Congress could make sure that goods could get from New Jersey to New York without New York imposing a tariff on those goods, we can regulate health care. It just doesn't fly." [Emphasis added.]
As the author of [another] blog referenced in Part 2 of this commentary wrote:
"Let’s review the general welfare clause: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
"First, notice it says PROMOTE. It doesn’t say provide. There is clearly a difference between promote and provide. If politicians in Washington had the keys to the case the Constitution sits in, they would have already gotten the White Out out and reworded it for their convenience....
"...Thomas Jefferson, who had a little to do with the creation of this country once said, a government that is powerful enough to give you everything is also powerful enough to take everything from you. Knowing this very quote alone, should be enough for the McCaskills who work from Capitol Hill knowledge [that] the general welfare clause isn’t permission by the founding fathers to provide every service they can to get people through their lives" [Link added].
Marsha [author of referenced blog], you wrote, "Though the goal may seem good, trying to compel others to live humanely won’t work. One of humanity’s most treasured gifts is our power of choice and free will – to take that away would make us less.”
True, indeed, and I would submit that, in supporting big government programs and ignoring the Constitution, advocates for "social justice," are supporting coercion that would force all of us "to live humanely" and thus would take away "One of humanity’s most treasured gifts (which) is our power of choice and free will." And, such advocacy, does, as you so well observe, "make us less" as human beings. Much less.
As you point out, "we can’t create a humane world by forcing people to comply with something they haven’t freely chosen." Or, alternatively, as you say in the title of your post, "There is No Compassion Through Coercion."
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