Its About Control

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Biden’s Vaccine Mandates: It’s about Power

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24 COMMENTS09/11/2021Ryan McMaken

The Biden administration on Thursday announced sweeping new mandates. The new mandates require that all employers with more than one hundred workers require workers to be vaccinated or to test for the virus weekly. The mandates also require covid vaccinations for the 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid. Moreover, vaccines are mandated for all employees of the federal government’s executive branch, and for all contractors who do business with the federal government. There is no option to test out in these cases.

The new mandates extend an earlier mandate from this summer which required vaccinations for nursing home staff to other healthcare settings, including hospitals, home health agencies, and dialysis centers.

Employees who don’t conform face termination. Employers who don’t play ball face the wrath of federal regulators.

Clearly, this represents yet another dangerous frontier in using a perceived or real crisis to justify an immense expansion in state power and state control over the population. 

The Vaccinated Still Spread the Disease

The reasons given for the mandate continue to shift. Some supporters of vaccine mandates continue to claim that the continued spread of covid-19 ought to be blamed on the unvaccinated.

Yet the facts do not support this position. We know that the vaccinated spread the disease freely, even if the vaccinated do not suffer the effects of the disease to the same extent as the unvaccinated. The infected vaccinated even carry a viral load similar to the unvaccinated. In fact, health officials so freely admit that the vaccinated spread the disease, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends mask mandates for the vaccinated.

Some other advocates of mandates, recognizing the incoherence of the “stop the spread” position, instead have reverted to the same rationale behind the old “flatten the curve” slogan of 2020. In this case, it is asserted that the unvaccinated are more likely to need hospitalization and thus are using up “too many” beds in intensive care units. That is, it’s no longer about stopping the spread of the disease, but about limiting use of medical resources.

The Return of “Flatten the Curve”

As with the old “flatten the curve” claims, this raises the question of why only covid patients are the target of federal mandates and public shaming. If failure to get vaccinated constitutes an “unhealthy choice” that must be punished with threats of losing one’s job, why are other unhealthy choices ignored?

Hospital beds are frequently filled with patients who overdose on drugs, chain smoke, or allow themselves to become morbidly obese. In fact, type 2 diabetes—which is entirely preventable—increased by 95 percent from 2001 to 2017, especially among the young.

If one mentions the unhealthy choices that sent these patients to intensive care, one is likely to be accused of “fat shaming” or blaming the victim. On the other hand, singling out vaccine-hesitant Americans for financial ruin should they refuse the vaccine is greeted with cheers and applause.

Abandoning Limits on Government Power

These arguments in favor of mandates, of course, are all premised on the idea that the federal government should be unrestrained in its ability to impose “solutions” to various perceived or real crises.

The question of legal authority for such acts seems almost academic at this point. It has become abundantly clear that the federal government—and especially the executive branch—regards legal and constitutional limits on federal power as mere inconveniences to be ignored. Debates over constitutionality are now, for the most part, a relic of an earlier age.

Just as the Trump administration invented a new federal power to regulate evictions at rental properties—with little political opposition—the Biden administration’s vaccine dictates for all private employers of a certain size are remarkable in their scope and unprecedented nature. The notion that a single person—a president—can regulate, with a stroke of a pen, the terms of employment for countless private sector employers is striking, even in this era of nearly untrammeled federal power.

Using Federal Spending to Get Compliance

Moreover, thanks to the growth of government spending and subsidies—such as Medicare and Medicaid—which now extend into so many American institutions nationwide, the federal government doesn’t even need to directly force compliance. The federal government can simply say, “If you want our money, do what we say.” After decades of conditioning America’s institutions to become addicted to federal money, this method becomes easier every year.

The exercise of so much direct federal power over 330 million Americans ought to be alarming. Yet for many Americans—likely around half of them—it will not be alarming at all. Notions of due process, natural rights, and decentralized state power are nearly without meaning to this portion of the population.

The Triumph of the Technocracy

Rather, the vaccine mandates represent merely the latest example of how the ruling class and much of the public supports a utilitarian technocratic state unrestrained by old classical liberal limitations on state power. In the minds of countless Americans, second thoughts about granting governments vast new powers is an old-fashioned and contemptible habit. What matters now is granting kind-hearted government agents the prerogatives to “do something.”

[Read More: “Why So Many Americans Reject Legal Due Process in the Age of Covid” by Ryan McMaken]

The groundwork for all this has been laid for decades in universities, public elementary schools, and in the media. The advent of “covid policy,” with its lockdowns and vaccine mandates, is simply the latest manifestation in the tradition of the PATRIOT Act and the War on Drugs. This thinking been embraced by both Left and Right, as both sides have sought federal action for their pet projects.

Yet the danger of the current “war on covid” is that it is nearly inescapable for the population as a whole. The intrusiveness of these policies—combined with the repugnance of a policy designed to force medication on millions of Americans—place them at a level above other government “wars” in the name of safety or “public health.”

Those who can resist mandates must do so. Even today, some avenues remain through the federal courts. And in recent years, state governments have shown an increasing willingness to openly oppose federal acts.

But until Americans begin to deny the moral permissiveness of “federal mandates” altogether, little progress will be made. As Ludwig von Mises repeatedly pointed out, only the power of ideas is sufficient to provide real limits on state power.Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first. 

Toronto Star on Unvaccinated

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If an unvaccinated person catches it from someone who is vaccinated, boohoo, too bad. I have no empathy left for the willfully unvaccinated. Let them die. I honestly don’t care if they die from COVID. Not even a little bit. Unvaccinated patients do not deserve ICU beds. At this point, who cares. Stick the unvaccinated in a tent outside and tend to them when the staff has time.

Below the headline, and below the fold, the Star notes in fine print “Selection of recent posts on Twitter.” Presumably this explains the use of alternating bold text, to distinguish the various Twitter posts. But this does not lessen the inflammatory nature of the headline.

While the necessity of hate speech laws is debatable, the fact is that (a) such laws exist in Canada, and (b) the Star broke those laws with its headline. But that is not what prompted me to write this article. Instead, what grabbed my attention was the fact that the headline did not generate any criticism from Canadian political leaders, or from other mainstream media outlets.

Conversely, if an obscure media company published a hateful, but inconspicuous (page 28), headline directed toward any ethnic minority group, or the LGBTQ+ community, politicians and mainstream media outlets would be tripping over themselves to see who could be the first to condemn such hateful, divisive, journalism. So why are they silent about hate speech directed toward the minority group of unvaccinated people?

In contrast to the silence from Canada’s political leaders and the mainstream media, many readers complained about the headline, thus eliciting a backhanded apology from the Star, which we are supposed to interpret as “we made a mistake, and if we could go back, we would not run that headline.” That is doubtful. Editors choose their front-page headlines carefully. Think about it. The provocative headline is prominently displayed on the front page, but the actual story is found on page two, under a different headline that reads “When it comes to empathy for the unvaccinated, many of us aren’t feeling it.” This headline is more palatable, and it is a much better description of the content of the story, but the Star made a conscious decision not to use it on the front page.

Instead, the front-page headline represents The Star’s compilation of various Twitter posts neatly arranged in a way that promotes a hateful, inflammatory narrative that is all too common in social media. This is blatantly obvious. It did not happen by accident. Why the Star printed the headline is open for speculation, but the headline itself was not an oversight, and the editors probably had their so-called apology prepared in advance. This reminds me of a scene I saw recently in a television program, where a reporter refused to submit her story because it would cause unnecessary harm to several people, and her editor told her that she would never be promoted until she learned that scruples have no place in journalism.

Ironically, on the same day the Star ran that headline, they also published an article bemoaning Canada’s ‘hate crime crisis.’ The Star is either the pot or the kettle, take your pick.

It seems that politicians and the mainstream media condemn hate speech only when it is directed toward groups with whom the government wants to curry favour, and unvaccinated people are not one of those groups. As Canadian politicians tighten the noose with their imposition of vaccine passports, perhaps it is becoming fashionable to direct hate speech toward unvaccinated people.

Will the promotion of this hateful narrative by a mainstream Canadian media outlet – which gets a free pass from Canada’s political leaders – encourage some people to commit violent acts against unvaccinated Canadians, to whom they previously only wished death upon. After all, if the Toronto Star’s narrative gets a free pass …?

Abortion

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Abortion is no longer a ‘womans’ talking point, and also remember this, you asked for this. Abortion is a ‘birthing people’ talking point. You know, now anyone can become pregnant. It’s our body, our choice. Isn’t this fun?! We don’t want our body violated by a foreign substance, such as a vaccine.

Leonardo and the Peerless Polymaths Who Changed History

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We live in dubious times, when great men and women of the past are being “canceled” by a few politically correct or “woke” fanatics, or, perhaps worse still, their work is being neglected or forgotten. It’s important, then, to remember some of the most remarkable persons of the past, especially those with the most amazing skills, and who made the greatest contributions to civilization.

A group of extraordinary individuals known as “polymaths” perfectly fit this category of world-changing intellects. A polymath is someone with very wide-ranging knowledge and prescient accomplishments. They are rare individuals, and every age seems to have a few of them. Sometimes they are called “renaissance men” (or women) because perhaps the greatest and most famous polymath was the iconic figure of the European Renaissance period, Leonardo Da Vinci.

A polymath’s polymath, Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) did so many extraordinary things, it takes one’s breath away. He was one of the greatest painters of all time; his Mona Lisa and The Last Supper are two of the world’s most famous masterpieces. He was also a notable architect and sculptor. He was a visionary inventor, drawing models of a helicopter, flying machine, parachute, gear shift, bicycle, snorkel, monkey wrench, canal locks system, hydraulic jacks, and automated instruments decades or even centuries before technology caught up with Da Vinci’s boundless imagination. His extendable ladder remains in use today. Although he hated war, he drew tanks, machine guns, and submarines long before they were put into use. He was the father of automation; his automated looms foreshadowed the Industrial Revolution by 300 years.

But that’s not all. As a scientific figure, he pioneered botanical science and comparative anatomy studies. In physics, he anticipated modern mechanics, optics, and hydrostatics. As author Michael J. Gelb points out in How To Think Like Leonrdo da Vinci, he also intimated some of the great scientific discoveries and breakthroughs of Copernicus, Newton, Galileo and Darwin long before they made them.

But the influence of polymaths on Western culture extends back further than da Vinci. In the ancient western world, the most notable polymath was the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 B.C. – 322 B.C.). He was a student of Plato and the teacher of Alexander the Great. His interests included, and he is considered the father of, many of the classical subjects of philosophy, science and scholarship. His writings and discoveries would have a major impact a thousand years later in propelling the West from the Medieval Age to the Renaissance. Only a third of his writings survive, but he is still widely read and regarded as a genius today, 2,500 years later.

America’s great polymath – and another student of Aristotle – was Ben Franklin (1706-1790). He was a scientist, inventor, diplomat, politician, author, and philosopher. Although most Americans today know him as a founding father of our country, his first demonstration of electricity had global scientific impact. He was the foremost printer and publisher in colonial America. He founded the University of Pennsylvania, and was the first U.S. Postmaster General. His diplomatic successes during the U.S. Revolutionary War, particularly winning French support for the American cause, were vital to securing independence. He is considered by many today to have been the most influential American of his age.

Perhaps the least known mega-polymath was Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974), a Bengali genius from the Indian subcontinent. He was a physicist and mathematician who also did serious work in chemistry, biology, philosophy, art, literature, and music. He collaborated with Albert Einstein on early studies of quantum mechanics. The key sub-atomic particle, the boson, was named after him. He spoke several languages and promoted Bengali literature. His work was seminal in the new field of quantum statistics. Self-effacing, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize which he did not receive, but which many peers felt he should have won. He worked with Marie Curie on X-ray radiation during a stay in Europe before returning to Calcutta to head a university department of physics, teach and do further research. As if that were not enough, he was also an accomplished musician.

Of course, few as they have been, there are other great visionary figures whose significant achievements and wide-ranging abilities could be cited, such as Helen Keller, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Schweitzer, Copernicus, George W. Carver, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Galileo, and Winston Churchill — to name only some of them.

Many of these, and other great innovators, achieved so much despite physical handicaps, Helen Keller and the deaf Beethoven for example, that their natural gifts are magnified by their indomitable wills and human spirit.

No matter how the dictates of political correctness change, the lives and work of these extraordinary individuals cannot be erased.