Between work and family commitments, I've barely been on the interweb since the Supremes' decision on Obamacare was handed down, so maybe someone else has made this connection. For all I know, Chief Justice Roberts may have cited it as a precedent in his opinion.
I'm in the middle of Amity Shlaes' superb - and heartbreaking - The Forgotten Man, and just ran across this eerily relevant passage:
[Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins] and [Paul] Douglas had their plans for unemployment insurance and pensions for senior citizens. At a tea at his house [in 1934?], Perkins had sat beside Justice Harlan Stone, and he gave her a tip. She had confided her fears that any great social insurance system would be rejected by his court. Not so, he said, and whispered back the solution: "The taxing power of the federal government, my dear; the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need." If the Social Security Act was formulated as a tax, and not a government insurance, it could get through.
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