STIGMERGY: The C4SS Blog
A Quick Thought on SCOTUS, Hobby Lobby and the Affordable Care Act

(Inspired by a comment from James Tuttle)

SCOTUS has been dancing its way down a “whatever it takes to keep things from collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions” tightrope with ACA.

First they affirmed its dubious constitutionality, now they’re carving out exceptions for entities which claim to be acting on orders of a boss in the sky.

They seem to have taken both decisions less on the merits than on a sort of assumption that the earth will explode if they don’t find a way to just keep things moving along in the direction they’re going.

For that matter, ACA itself is a strange hybrid — part primary intervention (massive corporate welfare), part secondary intervention (“affordable healthcare for all”) which seems to be failing as both and which the wheels are probably going to come completely off of sooner or later no matter what SCOTUS does.

I have trouble imagining ACA or anything that might happen with it as the specific spark of revolution, but I can definitely see people someday looking back on it in the same way that we now look back on Russians queuing up in line in front of state stores to get toilet paper or shoes.

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