As a brutal February rolls into a hopefully less brutal March, some of us start contemplating the spring planting season, with its promise of home-grown, straight-from-the-vine tomatoes. If you’ve never had a tomato straight off the vine, you’ve missed out on one of the great culinary joys of the universe. In a salad, on a sandwich, or simply sliced thick and drizzled with good olive oil and sea salt, the flavor of a properly ripened, homegrown tomato can bring tears of joy to your eyes. And, they make store-bought tomatoes, even the “on-the-vine” varieties, taste like soggy newspaper in comparison.
Imagine, though, the impact that your home garden has on the farmers of the nation. Should you choose to grow your own tomatoes, you’re likely to buy fewer tomatoes from the market. While some of those farmers might be locals, bringing their own vine-ripened tomatoes to a Saturday farmer’s market, others are located in other states or even in other countries. And, even if you’re the sort who would only buy vine-ripened tomatoes from the local farmer’s market, your growing tomatoes at home still displaces, two or three steps removed, tomatoes grown in California, or Florida, or Virginia. So, your choosing to grow tomatoes in your back yard has an effect on interstate commerce.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution includes the clause:
[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.”
Commonly referred to as the Commerce Clause, the original intent was to empower the federal government to oversee interstate trade, in part to keep them from engaging in tariff wars with each other. Yet, as we saw in our tomato example, even an act as isolated as growing tomatoes in one’s back yard affects commerce across state lines, and thus the government is empowered to “regulate” the tomatoes you grow and eat at home.
Does this sound a bit ridiculous, or extreme? Does the notion that the government can tell you how or even whether you’re allowed to grow tomatoes in your yard seem incompatible with a nation predicated on limited government and a government predicated on enumerated powers? Sadly, sounding extreme does not make it untrue. Famously, an Ohio wheat farmer named Roscoe Filburn exceeded, in 1941, a production quota established by the government (a quota meant to prop up wheat prices during the Depression). He intended the excess strictly for personal consumption, not for sale. But the government stated that, by growing wheat for his own consumption, he’d not be buying wheat on the open market, wheat that might come from out-of-state farms. While lower courts sided with Filburn, the Supreme Court ruled for the government, thereby granting the government virtually unfettered power over all economic acts. The case, Wickard v Filburn, is considered one of the worst rulings in Supreme Court history by many libertarians and small-government folks. And the logic of that decision is as applicable to your backyard tomatoes as it was to Roscoe Filburn’s personal stash of wheat.
We see similar logic in other aspects of our daily lives. Motorcycle riders are mandated to wear helmets in most states. Why? Because, should they fall unhelmeted, they might be a bigger burden on the insurance system than were they wearing helmets (there may be cause to dispute this, but the rationale need not be valid to motivate the rules-makers). We’re not allowed to buy raw milk anywhere but on a farm, or eat young cheeses made from raw milk, presumably because of health risks and the chance of adding burden to the health care system. Bans on trans fats and attempts to regulate the size of sodas are justified similarly. And, until the Supreme Court finally put a limit on the Commerce Clause in US v Lopez in 1992, this everything affects everything notion was used to justify the federal government giving itself authority to ban guns from school property all around the nation. Surely, the intent behind the Commerce Clause wasn’t as a broad empowerment of the government to regulate everything, when the balance of the Constitution is about limiting what the government is allowed to do. And those of us who believe in limited government refute the expansive everything affects everything justification for government involvement in all things. Liberty and sovereignty of an individual over himself are (were?) core principles of our nation.
Yet many small-government folks (notably, not so many libertarians) embrace everything affects everything when contemplating the role of the United States in world affairs. A common justification presented as justification for US military involvement around the world is the need to protect national interests. Presumably, since instability can adversely affect things like oil production, international shipping of oil, gas and other products, and even global demand for American products, it’s not only permissible but desirable for our government to intervene in regional or internal conflicts that don’t directly involve American territory. After all, we do see how the price of oil goes up and how the stock market dips whenever something unsettling happens in the Middle East or eastern Europe, and the extent to which we import petroleum and other products suggests that we have strategic interests in keeping the uncertainty about those imports to a minimum. Beyond military involvement, we witness monetary and materiel support for selected governments and regimes, treaties that provide comparative advantage to some nations over their neighbors, and the like. Even a few carefully chosen words from the President or the Secretary of State can affect other nations and the behavior of those therein.
But how can we reconcile American involvement all over the world with the principle of limited government and a respect for self-determination with an expansive attitude towards our government’s right to interfere with the affairs of other nations? How can an aversion to having our lives micromanaged by government coexist with an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy?
The Supreme Court, in US v Lopez, applied a “substantial” yardstick in its assessment of whether an activity affected interstate commerce. Therein lies the start of limiting the everything affects everything justification for government action. Unfortunately, “substantial” is in the eye of the beholder, so we are subject to the “eyes” of our political leaders in this regard. And, when you give politicians discretion in the amount of power they can take for themselves, history tells us most will opt for more, not less. More unfortunately, the opposition party hasn’t shown a whole lot of interest in narrowing government interference and involvement, whether it be as local as your back yard or as global as, well, the globe. It’s hard to find real champions for limited government and enumerated powers at home when even the party that claims to support those ideals applies a very different set of standards abroad.
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