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Notes -
Is the Allies winning WW2 really evidence of liberal societies with unplanned economies being better when they only won by taking national control of ~their entire economies, in some cases suspended elections, and turned the entire state towards control, propaganda, and bureaucracy?
I’d go so far as to say that “liberal” countries in the pre-WW2 sense just plain don’t exist today. Pre-Wickard v. Filburn the idea that the government even had the authority to decide whether you could grow grain on your own property to feed to your own horses was unthinkable. Such ideas didn’t really survive contact with war.
Wickard was a federalism case, not a natural rights case. It concerned which government had the authority to decide whether you could grow grain on your own property to feed to your own horses. A state law doing the same thing would have been constitutional, but probably ineffective given the nature of the national economy, under founding-era jurisprudence. (It might have been ruled unconstitutional under Lochner-era jurisprudence, but we now consider Lochner anticanonical for good reasons.)
As a separate issue, the law at issue in Wickard was a stupid law. But there are non-stupid laws which regulate the growing of your own grain on your own land to feed your own horses, like a law restricting stubble burning. The law pre-Wickard was that a state government could ban stubble burning, but the feds couldn't.
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