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Comment by joshheitzman | Hacker News Reader

Guess who decides whether its commerce or gambling?

I said 'commerce' not 'finance' because finance is just one of many, many things that is within the purview of federal law due the commerce clause.

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The Commerce Clause covers everything because they stretched it to include literally everything using "impacts market via supply shift." Even without any crossing of any state or even county line.

Yeah so? It is what is at this point.

The question isn't whether or not the commerce clause could regulate gambling. There's no debate that it could. The issue is that the CFTC does not regulate gambling. The question is what was the CFTC intended to regulate, not "what powers does congress have?". There's no dispute that congress could regulate gambling if they wanted to. They didn't.

Growing food on your own land to feed to your own animals (who also reside on the same land) is "interstate commerce", so I guess it's all "commerce".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

The ruling isn’t that growing food yourself is interstate commerce, they said that growing food yourself reduces interstate commerce because then you need to buy less food from others.

Doesn't matter. Court held that that characteristic was sufficient to elevate the activity to Federal jurisdiction, which has been used as a lynchpin decision for exploding the Federal regulatory state. Logically speaking, If *pointedly not doing activity in such a way as to not have commerce be interstate makes it interstate commerce by virtue of decreasing one's reliance on interstate commerce, all commerce is, therefore, interstate commerce.

There’s a difference between affecting interstate commerce and being interstate commerce. It’s not considered interstate commerce, it only is regulated because it affects interstate commerce.

Imagine there’s a law saying that regulating abortion is federal responsibility and the senate then uses this law as justification to ban demonstrations around abortion clinics. Would that mean that demonstrating next to an abortion clinic counts as abortion?

The problem with Wickard v Filburn is that there is literally no activity that doesn't qualify as interstate commerce, when the framers of the constitution clearly intended that "interstate commerce" was not an all-inclusive concept. If that's what they meant, why would they have placed any limits on Federal power? What is the point of having all those redundant words in the constitution?

That's why subsequent courts walked it back. It was an obviously flawed ruling that produces preposterous results.

I mean, can the government prohibit dying (and throw your corpse in jail) because death means buying less food from others? Can the federal government throw you in jail for not having enough children because that reduces the amount spent on baby clothes?

I don’t agree or disagree with the ruling (I don’t really care, I’m not even from the US), but I agree it seems pretty overreaching. I was just making the point that the court never claimed that growing your own food counts as interstate commerce.

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