Richard Thaler writes in the New York Times:

Justice Scalia is arguing that if the court lets Congress create a mandate to buy health insurance, nothing could stop Congress from passing laws requiring everyone to buy broccoli and to join a gym…Can anyone imagine Congress passing a broccoli mandate law, much less the court allowing it to take effect?

Yes annnnd…yes. Next question.

Surely, the justices have the conceptual resources to draw a distinction between the health care market and the market for broccoli. And even if they don’t, then all the briefs, the zillions of blog posts and a generation’s worth of economic literature can help them.

If drawing a constitutionally meaningful distinction between the markets for health insurance and broccoli is child’s play for Thaler, he should school all the brief- and blog-post-writers who so far have failed. That would have been a more productive use of his thousand words than his build-up to this thesis:

If you are opposed to a policy, state your case based on the merits — not on the imagined risk of what else might happen down the road. The path of that road is so unpredictable that it may even produce a U‑turn.

Good grief. Slippery-slope arguments are about principles. As in, “If you concede this principle because you don’t mind the result here, you will no longer have it to protect you against that bad result there.” Thaler’s thesis would lead, for example, to all manner of civil-liberties violations by the state because there simply isn’t enough political support to protect all the civil liberties of various minorities. But Thaler doesn’t want us to think about things like consequences or the future.

The potential for U‑turns makes no more sense as an argument against invoking slippery slopes principles, because principled arguments can help generate the U‑turn that opponents of, say, ObamaCare want to see.

I take silly arguments like this to be evidence that ObamaCare supporters are in complete panic mode.