Mandatory Musings
Joe Biden has renewed his call for a U.S.-wide mask mandate. This is paternalistic tyranny, without ever so much as a veneer of genuine concern for the public welfare. (Liberty used to be regarded as at least a factor in calculations of the public welfare.)
Meanwhile, U.S. Today keeps the flame of progressive revolution burning bright with this increasingly typical, and thoroughly predictable, headline: “Experts worry that a COVID-19 vaccine won’t help if not enough people are willing to get one.” The article under that headline informs the reader that in recent polling, many Americans express reticence about the necessity of getting a vaccination (which does not exist yet) for an illness that they do not recognize as a major risk in their own lives (because it isn’t). As the writer, Karen Weintraub — always important to identify the mouthpieces of totalitarianism by name wherever possible — observes, carrying water for the “experts”:
But convincing them that getting a vaccine is a good idea will take effort and money. And so far, no federal dollars have been set aside for vaccine education.
Peter Pitts oversaw the Food and Drug Administration’s public outreach programs during the George W. Bush administration. Back then, as now, there was no budget.
“It was all bully pulpit stuff, and that only goes so far,” said Pitts, now president and co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, a New York-based nonpartisan think tank.
Now we’re in a global crisis, and funding and attention is urgent, he said. “As far as I can tell, there’s no strategy on the federal or state or local levels to educate the public relative the value of a COVID vaccine specifically, or to vaccines just in general.”
You see, the bully pulpit is not enough. More direct and visceral bullying is required, and that means tax dollars expropriated to fund massive government propaganda campaigns to indoctrinate everyone to believe what the experts want them to believe, so that the pharmaceutical companies and their political allies can make more money while crushing any semblance of limited republicanism forever. Or, to use the polite phraseology, federal dollars must be set aside for “vaccine education.”
As always, that mandatory federally-funded “education” will merely be the rhetorical, mass-palliative accompaniment to coercion. There will be a proposed universal vaccination mandate. If a major presidential candidate can openly call for a mask mandate, what principle would prevent that same candidate, or his rival (should he decide it will make him more famous) from demanding a vaccine mandate. Forcing citizens to take medicine (and potentially undergo side effects) they do not need, for an illness they do not have, seems to me to stretch the powers of the federal government just a tad beyond the limits outlined in the U.S. Constitution. But perhaps I am just too fussy about these things. After all, the masses are just so stupid. Someone has to “educate” them about what is good for them, right?
