By advocating for mandatory vaccines and vaccine passports, the “my body, my choice” growd is undermining their own position, and they don’t seem to realize it.
I’m a small Government Conservative for lots of reason, chief among them is that I believe that keeping Government small and weak is the best way to protect our individual liberties, under the theory that it would have been much easier to strangle baby Hitler in his crib than it was to defeat his Government’s Army on the battlefield.
If 2020, with all its lockdowns and mandates, taught us anything it’s that I’ve been dead right about that. But the other reason I believe in small Government solutions to our problems is that arguing for limited Government never leads me into the cul-de-sac of hipocrisy.
The issue of Vaccination Mandates is a perfect example. A lot of Prominent Liberals are pushing for a carrot and stick approach that features exactly the kind of big fat stick that ought to scare the pants off of all of us. One Twitter Blue Checkmark actually suggested that we offer people 50 bucks to get vaccinated and that if they still refuse, we hold them down and force the shot into their arm anyway, and then pay them nothing. The argument goes that since COVID is such a serious threat to public safety, we have a duty to ignore people’s civil right to autonomy over their own bodies.
Which makes me wonder how many other things might one day be labeled a serious threat to public safety…
Try to forget, for a moment, how terrifying that is and let’s take this concept to its logical conclusion. The Left has been telling us for decades that Climate Change is an existential threat to all life on Earth and that we must attack it as if from a war footing. Super-Genius AOC and others have argued we need a new Manhattan Project, all hands on deck, WWII-style mobilization to meet this deadly threat. Literally no amount of money should be considered too much they tell us, literally no solution should be considered too radical.
OK fine, granted… so how about this… Climate Change is an existential threat to all life on Earth and overpopulation is a major driver of the most dangerous effects of Climate Change… therefore you must immediately abort the child you are carrying. Now… you can do it voluntarily and we’ll pay you 50 bucks, or we can hold you down and cut that baby out of you by force. It’s for the common good, after all, your pregnancy is literally killing people.
Or how about this one… what if a ban on abortion actually came from the Left instead of the Right. We all know that our Social Security and Medicare Systems are headed towards insolvency. The most significant reason is that people are living longer and drawing on the system for more years than ever before, while simultaneously our overall population is falling because people are having fewer babies. You have to have more people paying into the entitlement system than there are people taking out of it or the entire system collapses… one person can never pay enough in taxes to support more than one retiree.
Well here in 2021, that’s exactly what’s happening, and the Elites damned well know it. That’s why the Democrats (with some help from a few squish Republican Chamber of Commerce types) are all in on open borders. They don’t want the bill for their profligate entitlement spending to come due while they’re on the clock, so they are importing all the workers that Americans, increasingly, refuse to give birth to themselves.
So… now imagine that one day the entitlement system is literally on the verge of collapse and you go into your local Government Healthcare provider for an abortion (because the Dems will have passed Single Payer by then), and the Government Doctor says “I’m sorry, but abortions have been outlawed. We need every available baby to be carried to term because our entitlement system is on the verge of collapse. It’s your patriot duty to have this child. We can’t force you to get pregnant, but we can force you to carry your baby to term once you are pregnant… guess you shoulda been more careful, huh?”
How would these scenarios be fundamentally different than a vaccine-based social credit system where you can be denied essential services based on your vaccination status? Or a world where Government agents can drag you from your home and force a needle into your arm?
After the last 18 months we’ve endured, who among us can still claim that something like these more extreme examples could never happen?
Once the Government’s right to force something into your body has been normalized, what’s to stop them from demanding that something be removed from your body, or forcing you to keep something in your body that you don’t want, for the same “never let a crisis go to waste” reasons?
USA Today has a headline from this past week that reads “When Should Liberty Yield to Public Good?” The correct answer is “never.” This isn’t even a discussion that we should entertain… because once you establish a benchmark for exactly when liberty must yield to a perceived public good, you create a situation where politicians will always ALWAYS try to move that benchmark further from Liberty and closer to Tyranny… and if we’ve learned anything over the last two years, it’s that the forces of Liberty are no longer strong enough to resist that push.
Eventually, the guillotine comes for everyone.