Here is a gloomy wail by Dahlia Lithwick against the conservative case brought to attack the sprawling ‘Obamacare’ Affordable Care Act, which now has reached the US Supreme Court:

But after the aggressive battery of questions from the court’s conservatives this morning, it’s clear that we can only be truly free when the young are released from the obligation to subsidize the old and the ailing…

This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don’t want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old. Until today, I couldn’t really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of “liberty.”

This case isn’t so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It’s about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that’s been inspected. It’s about the freedom to be left alone. And now we know the court is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it’s 1804.

All of which misses the point of the litigation. Namely are there limits to what the state can force individuals to do in the name of supposedly common goals? And if so where are they definitively defined?

This case alas could not be brought in the UK. We have a system under which The-Queen-in-Parliament is indeed sovereign and can pass whatever laws they like (subject only to the European Court of Human Rights declaring them an abuse of core human rights). In the USA things are different and better. The federal government has powers under the US Constitution but, in principle, only those powers. So battle is joined on whether compelling most people across the USA to take out health insurance is an abuse of those powers.

Ms Lithwick of course confuses two things. Whether and when there is a moral obligation on X to help Y and Z. And how far it is appropriate for the state to order X to help Y and Z, in which case it’s no longer a moral obligation in any important sense.

My view? Any new law of 2700 pages is an absurd and arrogant abuse of process in its very nature, and should be struck down for that reason. It is necessarily incoherent and immoral.

But if that wise and simple view does not prevail, then what? Here are conservative commenters giving a wide range of interesting ideas on what might happen to Obamacare depending on what the Supreme Court decides. One issue is obvious – if one notable pillar of this monstrous law is struck down as unconstitutional, what happens to the rest of it (the doctrine of ‘severability’)? Read on.

Update:  See also this superb article by Walter Russell Mead which says everything I might have been able to say and so much more on the deeper problems with Obamacare and many other aspects of modern government – complexity.