[Retric]

> Make a completely private intimate recording with your spouse for your personal use?

Wheat is a commodity, works are art are not. So even just the first example you used doesn’t apply. We’ve specifically brought up multiple classes of exceptions on this thread and you added another one.

I suggest you read this before trying to come up with examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity

[ndriscoll]

Whether a good is fungible is a a subjective thing. Would the wider market consider your private recording as fungible among all of the other recordings out there? Almost certainly yes. In any case, it would certainly meet the threshold for affecting interstate commerce that Wickard started, which does not require you to be interacting with commodities markets specifically. The meaning of that was almost unlimited for a long time after Wickard. It took 53 years to finally decide that something was not interstate commerce: existing near a school in possession of a gun, and that was a 5-4 decision. The dissenting opinion postulated that gun violence in schools has a substantial effect on the job market because employers view education as important, and existing in possession of a gun near a school could affect gun violence in schools. This very nearly won out as an argument. You can't make this stuff up it's so ridiculous.

The court actually affirmed 6-3 in 2005 that Congress can regulate home-grown marijuana for personal consumption because of its possible effects on demand within a market that it is federally illegal to participate in. Because some people make illegal trades, even if you are a law-abiding citizen and never would, you apparently affect interstate commerce by following the law and growing your own (in a state where doing so is legal). Absolute trash ruling by a clown court. Directly based on Wickard.

When you look at the whole framework/design of the US government, it's obvious that Wickard was a garbage ruling and that they had at that point completely capitulated to FDR, who we recall had threatened to pack the court if they didn't start giving him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted. FDR wants unlimited authority to do anything? Commerce clause suddenly means Congress can regulate anything which could possibly (even in a counterfactual universe) involve a casual chain where someone interacts with something that interacts with something that eventually at some point in the chain could have crossed state lines.

[Retric]

> Whether a good is fungible is a a subjective thing.

It’s a continuum, but not particularly subjective. The degree to which something is an equivalent good depends on how people treat the item in question.

They may both be religious books but I doubt you’d find many people ambivalent if they are buying a Bible or Quran. They evaluate a used car based on mileage, but people are far more picky about content.