I don’t get why people do or don’t do some things. I mean, people jump out of perfectly good airplanes. But should we outlaw it?
Guys ride motorcycles without wearing helmets. This is insane. But I’ve talked with lots of them, and I have yet to find a single one who doesn’t fully understand the risk. For them this manifestation of freedom makes the risk worthwhile.
It’s that “pursuit of happiness” thing that purveyors of the command-and-control nanny-state have total disregard for. Protecting freedom doesn’t mean protecting someone’s freedom to make the same decision you’d make. It’s about protecting someone’s freedom to make the decision you find unfathomable.
Intolerant social engineers will all say the same thing, some blather about the cost to society if people keep making unhealthy decisions, so outlaw soda and mandate vaccines. But beware of that logic. Convince enough people that the societal cost of, say, gay marriage is too high, we might outlaw that along with trans fats.
I don’t understand why some people don’t get their COVID vaccine. I wish they would. We’d all be better off. And for the most part I think they’d be better off.
Gov. Polis has taken some flak for his callous comment that exploited the suffering from COVID victims to pimp the vaccine.
“710 Coloradans who chose not to get vaccinated are in the hospital for no good reason,” Polis said. “Some won’t even make it, some will die. Some will make it, but it will be a harrowing few days and weeks. We wish them well in their recovery, but we also wish their misery helps get the message out about why people need to be vaccinated.”
I agree with the governor. I hope their misery, and being in the ICU is miserable, helps convince people to avoid such despair, pain and death by getting the vaccine. Jared’s comment was a fully appropriate way to sway people. Good on him. That’s persuading, not forcing.
It’s the heavy-handed coercion from Polis and many on his team that is truly un-American and should stop.
Anyone else find it sadly funny that the same folk who scream racism and voter suppression over voter photo ID laws are the first to support proof of vaccination and photo ID to get into public establishments?
Does it seem tortured logic to see the same woman scream, “my body, my choice!” now call for vaccine mandates, you know, to save lives?
The grand lesson from the governmental reaction to COVID is simple. When the people are scared, they become complicit in the expansion of governmental control. Or boiled down to its essence — fear invites tyranny.
Could Hitler ever come to power if Germans weren’t fearful and starving from the results of hyper-inflation (inflation itself a government-created phenomenon)?
Would the people of Colorado ever stand idly by as unelected bureaucrats destroy businesses, rip away people’s right to freely associate, exercise their freedom to worship and deny school to their children via lockdown orders if the media didn’t spin their Chicken Little COVID narrative to such an exquisitely frightful extent?
Fearful people hunger for the illusion of security. Fear empowers oppression.
It empowers it so much that the federal, state and local governments are now using the power of law to force newly engineered chemical compounds into other people’s veins.
A previous, less fearful generation would believe it was government’s role to protect the people from such violations of their own flesh.
The news stories are becoming surreal.
In Big Brother fashion, Polis has ordered that schools share vaccination records with the Dept. of Health. Every time my doctor takes my kid’s blood pressure, I must sign a form informing me of our HIPPA privacy rights. No one can have my son’s medical information, except of course the governor whenever he asks for it.
Hospitals are understaffed because their staff, medical professionals by definition, would rather go unemployed than get the mandated jab.
A Colorado woman with stage 5 renal failure can’t now get her life-saving surgery because both she and her kidney donor refuse to be vaccinated.
These people are making decisions I wouldn’t make. They feel so strongly, be it for religious or health reasons, they are willing to lose their livelihoods and quite possibly their lives for their decision.
So, just who owns their bodies, Governor?
Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver.
