Healthcare: A mandate that overreaches

There is a technical term for the mechanism used by the government to secure funds for discharging obligations it considers important. It's called a "tax." Hardly anyone disputes that Congress possesses the constitutional power to enact a tax to pay for newly conferred healthcare benefits. Whether it possesses the authority to mandate that Americans enter into contracts to purchase insurance from third parties in the furtherance of some governmental objective is, by contrast, a contestable question.

Thus, it would have reduced Obamacare's complexity and constitutional jeopardy if the president had chosen to pay for it with a tax. Obama eschewed such candor, and resorted to the individual mandate, in order to keep his campaign promise not to raise any federal tax on any U.S. family making less than $250,000.

The individual mandate is more than a bad solution for the administration's tax-pledge problem, however. Both the mandate and the tax promise are symptoms of modern liberalism's core defect: chronic disingenuousness about its agenda's costs and how those costs will be paid. It was always absurd, even insulting, for Obama to claim he could fulfill his many campaign promises about healthcare, green jobs, infrastructure investments, expanding education and on and on, while exempting 97% of all Americans from any tax increase. The individual mandate compounds that problem, and that dishonesty, by paying for Obama's central domestic achievement with a tax that pretends it's not a tax.

William Voegeli is a senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, the author of "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State," and a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College's Salvatori Center.