Work to live, not the other way around. Work produces income and is a means to an end.
Drill down a couple of levels on what it means to you to be happy, productive, warm, and loving. What do an ideal day and week look and feel like? What kind of life would you like your kids to have? Not abstractly. What would their ideal school situation be? How far from school? Any special opportunities like certain clubs, interest in playing an instrument, sports teams? Do you just do weekend warrior stuff, or does being a responsible, fun, constructive parent mean you’re picking them up after school regularly to go make memories?
Let’s say it’s something like the last bit for a moment. “Begin with the end in mind” is one of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and in this case, the end is being a fun parent by going for ice cream or to the park or watch a movie or take guitar lessons together a couple of days a week after school. To make that happen, you’ll need to have flexible work hours and maybe a work location near their ideal school. Do the rare and valuable knowledge and skills that you’ve accumulated allow you do that? If so, great! You’re passionate about being a good parent; you don’t need that from your job. Your job is a means to an end. If the current conditions of your job get in the way of your goal of being a responsible, fun, constructive parent, how could you modify job parameters?
There’s no right answer. There’s your answer. What do you want for your kids? What do you want for you and your wife now and after they’ve left the nest? Walk around in a day, a week of that life in your head. There’s your end. Work backward from there.
That’s a nice driving tour of the effects of the economic calculation problem.
For those unfamiliar (not Mike based on his observations about Star Trek’s economy), absent a working price system, no rational method for economizing, i.e., choosing between alternatives, exists. When building a railroad, do you go around the mountain or tunnel through it? Who knows? Take away the profit-loss test, and the loudest, most aggressive thug in the room wins out, which Mike noted the history of communist countries as confirming.
Understanding the economic calculation problem reveals why communists had to copy or steal not just the technology but even its prices. Granting the extreme of an entire country full of perfectly obedient “new Soviet men” — which emphatically did not exist, as shown by the common saying “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us” — Maximum Leader is in the dark without prices; he doesn’t know what to command them to build! So he does the next best thing: crib off someone else’s paper.
For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars … But what would have been thought of that assembly, if, attaching themselves to these general expressions, and disregarding the specifications which ascertain and limit their import, they had exercised an unlimited power of providing for the common defense and general welfare? I appeal to the objectors themselves, whether they would in that case have employed the same reasoning in justification of Congress as they now make use of against the convention. How difficult it is for error to escape its own condemnation!
You have identified a root perversion. Roscoe Filburn’s wheat did not leave Ohio or even his farm. He didn’t offer it for sale; the wheat was for his own use. It was deemed to “affect interstate commerce” and thus within the scope of the interstate commerce clause. With that, a provision intended to remove power of states to tax each other’s goods and services and promote a free trade zone instead became a mechanism to nitpick and micromanage every last little detail, ossify existing practice, protect large players, give loopholes to the politically connected, and enable mass regulatory capture. It cannot be overturned quickly enough.
You’re almost certainly correct. Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson would argue this consequentualist line. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch could be persuaded by textualist or originalist arguments and are the most likely overturn votes. Kavanaugh was a key man on standing up and defending the so-called PATRIOT Act during the George W. Bush administration, so no way he knocks out this pillar.
ACB talked a strong originalist game during her confirmation but since shown it’s not her core philosophy. Although Roberts appears inclined to rein in the administrative state, he’s aligned chaotic neutral and thinks himself too clever.
Already down 4-3 and having to persuade both Barrett and Roberts to join a ruling overturning parts of Wickard, another Dobbs seems wildly unlikely even though both precedents were poorly reasoned. At best, they agree to some marginal or technical reduction in scope. It seems equally likely that she sides with the four, in which case, what does Roberts do? He may need to make it 6-3 to control who writes the opinion. Such strong numbers would be unfavorable enough on the surface that he might persuade her back to an even more tepid limitation. The concurring opinions that it would induce from Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch would be entertaining reading, at least.
There's no way Roberts would vote to overturn this given his history of pretending a penalty directly remitted to the IRS for not carrying health insurance was not a tax for the whole ACA fiasco.
But Filburn must needs be overturned. The sovereignty of states depends on it.
Please suggest one, but ideally three, things that you think that overturning Wickard would lead to that would cause K, S & J to vote against doing so?
The federal civil rights act of 1964 is probably a good one. The clean air act is another. Probably others like consumer protection laws, healthcare regulations, safety laws (OSHA), etc. These are all based on the expanded powers from wickard v fillburn. If portions of these were challenged and overturned, I believe those justices would not view that as a good thing.
In Gonzales, O'Connor dissented and Scalia, who was too afraid of pulling the rug out from under the administrative state, issued a concurrence. So, surprises do happen.
I was prepared to excuse his vote as an exceptional situation until Sebelius, when rather than revisit and fix his mistake in Gonzales he chose to embrace the affirmative mandate vs passive prohibition distinction nonsense, a deux ex machina fit for one purpose and one purpose only. Fool me once....
There's a good argument to be made that it was just good luck for Scalia's intellectual legacy that he died before the conservative supermajority on the court got rolling, because he was already well on his way to replacing principles with expediency: https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/03/justice-scalias-uncertain... Like the old saying goes, it's easy to criticize, much more difficult to offer constructive, durable solutions.
I call BS. Wickard is about, effectively, "police power" based on a broad interpretation of the scope of federal/interstate commerce.
As noted by other commenters, the concept of federal control of interstate commerce was intended to prevent states from interfering with trade between themselves and other states, and to create some "higher" authority for aspects of commerce that truly transcended state borders and control.
Most of what has happened in terms of programs and regulations fits very comfortably into that understanding. What doesn't, which I don't think is a lot, should probably go away anyway.
If you can use the commerce clause to prevent a guy growing wheat on his own property and feeding that crop in its entirety to his animals, there literally isn't an activity the federal government can't regulate.
Correct. I'm suprised sexual orientation hasn't been regulated by the same stupid logic. Clearly if you're not making babies you're effecting all kinds of interstate commerce.
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