02-15-2022, 12:18 PM
(02-14-2022, 09:06 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:(02-14-2022, 10:53 AM)David Horn Wrote:(02-14-2022, 12:50 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:(02-13-2022, 10:36 AM)David Horn Wrote: I don't see anything even vaguely similar to your item 3. Government reach has been declining for decades due primarily to a well thought-out campaign against anything that impedes the full exercise of private power. In short, the government has been neutered, and nothing gets resolved as long as that continues.
You mean like vaccine passports, forced shut downs, police arresting people because they had gatherings in their own homes of over 10 people? It's true, most of this has been on the state rather than federal level, but the extension of government powers into said domains hasn't exactly been subtle. Once we get out of the country, it gets even worse. France has gone police state and Australia has gone straight up Orwellian (forcing people to verify their location with face pics at random intervals, armed police patrolling residential neighborhood streets, helicopters being sent out to find people).
Vaccine Passports have happened outside the US, but only a very few states have attempted anything similar. I personally favor that approach, but its water under the bridge at this point. Forcing behavior on the unwilling is part of what government does. Sorry, you can't just rob this store -- you're getting arrested. Vaccinating your children before they attend school is another example, and one followed everywhere for a long time. These are fully rational responses to irrational provocations. The blind freedom to do as one pleases only works when those freedoms are self-regulated. We're way past that now.
Comparing mandates not to rob people to mandates to close down your business because of lockdowns is an absurd false equivalence. Personally I'm not concerned about most of the mask stuff (you just...put on a mask and do what you were doing anyway), but the forced closure of business (except corporations....) and frequent use of surveillance by governments across the world....no. The Constitution does not have exception clauses for crises, and this is for good reason, because those are precisely the times it's needed most (for example, the Bill of Rights in particular was created largely to protect unpopular people, such as those with controversial views, potential criminals, people who challenge government actions, etc).
The required lockdowns were needed until vaccines came along, and they ended too soon because Trump believed that covid would just go away and that closing the economy would hurt his election chances. Actually, his premature closings and his hesitant rollout of vaccines are what hurt his election chances. We can't go back to lockdowns in the USA now, but we need vaccine mandates because the largely right-wing delusional antivax creeps are keeping the pandemic going with new variants emerging, along with the greedy drug companies themselves who refuse to share thair vaccine patents with the world. Being a libertarian country that gives freedom to "enterprise," we in the USA are not doing these things, so I expect the pandemic to return and just go on and on.
Meanwhile, France and some other countries still have horrific covid rates and so it seems they have to still do lockdowns. What we have endemic now across the world is people rising up for constitutional freedoms and being jailed and shot down by tyrants who have a monopoly of weapons. The rise of tyranny across the world has nothing to do with the pandemic. It is an epidemic of tyranny in much of the world where leaders think themselves entitled to power and that obedience to the brutal ruler is the correct model for life and state.