Your Argument Just Tripped on a Rock and Shot Itself in the Foot With a Rusty Musket

That Congress lacks the power to require people to buy a product when the national interest demands it would surprise the Founding Fathers. They required people to do just that. In the second Militia Act of 1792, they required individuals to outfit themselves with a military-style firearm and ammunition. This was the first 'individual mandate' and one had to obey even if one had to go out and buy a gun. Being passive didn't put you out of Congress's reach.

Okay: that's sort of almost true, if you stop with a single clause of the law, carefully shield yourself from notice of later militia laws, and avoid noticing anything that any actual human beings ever did in reality.

Let's start with a single brief story to suggest a very broad national pattern:

In September of 1814, a brigade of Connecticut militia met for review and inspection. The officer assigned to conduct the inspection, Major Ralph Ingersoll, would find himself in front of a court martial a few months later, accused by three other officers of unofficerlike behavior and neglect of duty. The foundation of the charges was that Ingersoll had been"unnecessarily rigid + severe in the inspection of the arms."

Simple translation: Ingersoll had offended his fellow officers by actually inspecting the brigade.

In his written defense statement, Ingersoll noted that much of the state's militia had melted away in the face of invading British forces, a painful reality that reflected a nationwide problem. The country was essentially unprepared to fight a war that it had already been fighting for two years.

In Connecticut, Ingersoll told the court, militiamen"absolutely flung aside the very muskets, which had freed their heads from taxation, as unfit for service; + called upon the state, to furnish them with arms -- Yes Sir, arms which the soldiers would have cursed their officers, for condemning on a parade ground, were in numbers of instances, by the same soldiers, abandoned as useless, when called to encounter the realities of service."

Militia records from the decades after 1792 return to this reality over and over and over again: the requirement that every militiaman be armed with an adequate weapon and equipment never led to an earthly reality in which every militiaman was armed with an adequate weapon and equipment. The open secret of the era was that the Militia Act's requirements had the substance of dissipating steam. Government said that everybody had to do it. But nobody much did it.

This is, by the way, not a return to Michael Bellesiles' argument. Militiamen were armed, but not necessarily with weapons they wanted to bet their lives on. This was a distinction that led to constant anger and argument between militia privates and militia officers (and to officers who gave up, and so found themselves horrified by fellow officers like Ingersoll who actually bothered to keep trying). A requirement that everyone of a certain class do X led to endless conflict over the boundaries of X -- to forty years of sneaking and cheating and evasion. This power was contested until it broke.

By 1826, Secretary of War James Barbour would ask a board of officers,"aided by the results of a correspondence with the governors of the several States and Territories and other citizens of intelligence and experience," to examine"the acknowledged defective condition of our militia system." (That description comes from President John Quincy Adams.)

The universal militia, founded upon the idea that much of the white male population of fighting age would be compelled to reliably arm itself, was dead. It was replaced by a militia system based on volunteers.

So, yes: Congress required that every member of a particular group buy a particular product. Every member of that group did not buy the product. The policy failed, entirely and unmistakably. It didn't come close to working. This is clearly a solid foundation for rational health care policy.

And by the way, the"first 'individual mandate'" that required everyone to buy a gun? It didn't. It required white men between the ages of 18 and 45 to be armed, exempting only"the Vice-President of the United States, the Officers, judicial and executives, of the government of the United States; the members of both houses of Congress, and their respective officers; all custom house officers, with the clerks; all post officers, and stage-drivers who are employed in the care and conveyance of the mail of the post office of the United States; all Ferrymen employed at any ferry on the post road; all inspectors of exports; all pilots, all mariners actually employed in the sea service of any citizen or merchant within the United States; and all persons who now are or may be hereafter exempted by the laws of the respective states."

So a sort of slightly weak universal mandate, that one.