Yesterday, Greg Sargent did a little historical research and cited John Adams' support for the 1798 Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seaman, as a precedent for government intervention to ensure access to health care. It's the sort of thing liberals should be doing more of, because there's more historical precedent for that kind of thing among the founders than most conservatives or libertarians would have you believe. Chris Edwards at Cato writes in response:
On the politics of this, note that John Adams, who signed the bill into law as president, was on the “big government” end of the Founders, and his big-government approach in office in the 1790s–like signing the Alien and Sedition Acts–led to the ouster of the Federalists by Thomas Jefferson in 1800. (Nonetheless, Adams was, of couse, a hero of the Revolution and a truly great man).
Sure. But the point is that there were "big government" types among the founders, and that the notion that the Constitution was a "libertarian document" rather than one that represented a certain amount of compromise between contemporary political factions with competing ideas about government and individual liberty is a myth. Even Jefferson favored the 1798 law, which also bolsters the liberal argument that health care provides the kind of unique challenge the federal government was meant to solve, rather than an unconstitutional intrusion on individual liberty that the founders would have seen as abhorrent. Most conservatives believe as an article of faith that constitutionally justified federal intervention is an invention of the New Deal era, rather than part of a legitimate tradition of constitutional thought that has existed since the founding.
