I’m referring to Neal McCluskey, who takes up at some length on Cato’s blog the point I made earlier, namely that the Constitution does not give the government authority to make student loans. Neal takes the point all the way, though. There is no constitutional authority for the feds to do anything relating to education. Education is one of the innumerable things that under the Tenth Amendment was supposed to be left to the states or the people.
So, where did all the illicit federal power come from? Mostly from torturing the General Welfare Clause to mean that Congress can do anything as long as it says that it believes more people will be helped than harmed. But, emphatically, that is not what the Constitution’s framers meant.