Today's Supreme Court Health Care Decision

Today, the decision about whether millions of people would get health care was left to one person, John Roberts. There was plenty of contorted legal reasoning on all sides to justify any decision that John Roberts wanted to make for us. The reason why he decided as he did can not be judged with any certainty, but given the clash of competing legal and ethical principles and how any decision could have presented itself as being principled, "principle" can be regarded as standing for "how John Roberts wanted to present himself to history".

In a degraded political system, it's impossible to write anything with clarity. If I write that the Constitution gives us a dysfunctional politics in which elites make important decisions for the rest of us, it instantly blends into every other criticism of the system, in which belief that the decision is invalid because Obama is supposed to be a Kenyan Muslim goes right along with the U.S.-libertarians believing that it's invalid because taxation is theft and with the various moderates of all kinds talking about "activist judges" or "executive overreach" if the particular decision happened to be one that they didn't like.

We don't actually live within a rule of law. For a while, Bush was the Decider of what was legal. Then Obama took it on himself to decide who we should kill. Ben Bernanke has decided that we should remain in the Little Depression. The Supreme Court chief judge gets to decide on close elections and various social issues. Underlings produce the rationalizations, which are not really worth studying, and a two-tiered system of enforcement ensures that elites are not punished for whatever they decide to do, whether it would be illegal for lesser people to do or not.

The first step in getting out of oligarchy is to reject the political nonsense that we grew up with. The Constitution is a relic, and we'd be better off without it.

P.S.: Also, see here.