Free To Choose

Individual choice has been the basic foundation of the most free and prosperous societies in the history of the world. It is what drives innovation and the growth of a society. Once a government takes away the ability for people to make their own decisions about their lives, it usually ends in a horrific way almost every time. Whether it's communism or fascism, we have seen many instances of the suppression of individual rights and liberties. On the other hand, we have seen societies flourish when individual rights and liberties are respected and promoted. The individual’s freedom to choose is one of the main correlating factors in all successful nations of the past.

In the last two years the world has been dealing with a virus and one of the main arguments people all over the world are discussing today is whether there should be mandatory vaccines or not. Whether we should allow each individual to make his own decision about getting the vaccine or take away that decision to choose and make it mandatory for him to take it.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the vaccines are safe, effective and are backed by scientific data. Even if that is the case, I am still opposed to a government mandating the vaccine or requiring a vaccine passport. The decision to get vaccinated needs to be left to the individual. It is not the government’s role to tell people what they have to do for their own good. It doesn't matter if getting vaccinated is good for society. It’s not about what is good for society. It’s about what is good for the individual. We don't do what's good for society, we do what is good for ourselves. We are a society of individuals. You cannot force an individual to sacrifice himself for the benefit of other people.

This is especially true when you allow the government to decide what is best for society. It is dangerous to let the government define what's in the public good and then make everybody sacrifice their individual liberty for the public good as defined by the government. Because governments have a history, especially corrupt governments, as they have more power tend to become more corrupt.

Even if forced vaccinations are a good thing for society now, we don't want to set a precedent that the government gets to determine what is good for the collective and then force us to give up our rights to pursue that definition of the public good. Right now it has to do with Covid vaccines but we have no idea what it might have to do with in the future. You don't want to establish the precedent of letting a government define what the best decision for every individual is and then have the power to force people to do what it believes and not let them make their own decision.

We cannot allow the government to mandate vaccines. The mandates would have to be that vaccines are required in public places. Like a public library or institution. But that requirement that might apply to public places of interaction should not apply to the private sector. Meaning the government cannot tell a private entrepreneur that all of his workers must be vaccinated or all of his customers must be vaccinated. Those choices must be made by the business owners. They own their business and pay taxes. The last thing they need is the government telling them who is allowed in their establishment and who isn’t.

Also, I don't think that governments have the right to force you to do something simply because it benefits somebody else. There may be people that don't want the vaccines for whatever reason and you can't say that you have to get the vaccine because it’s going to protect your neighbour. Let your neighbour protect himself by getting the vaccine. In fact, when you tell people everybody has to get the vaccine to protect the people who have the vaccine, your kind of undercutting the message that the vaccine works. If the vaccine works, why aren't the people who get vaccinated protected? That creates a lot of suspicion in and of itself.

There are also other laws that protect us from ourselves like laws against drugs, gambling, prostitution, etc. All of this is supposed to protect the public from harming themselves. But here is the irony. The government actually makes these things worse. Take gambling for example, most governments outlaw gambling but then run their own state lottery. The reality is, no private lottery company would give you odds as bad as a state-run lottery. The amount of money they keep is huge. If there was a free market in gambling, no gambling operator would ever get away with ripping off their customers to that degree. Basically, the government, based on the pretence that they will protect us from gambling outlaws all competition and now they come in as the only source of legal gambling and rip everybody off. So everyone ends up losing more money gambling than they would have lost had it been legal.

It should be up to the individual. If a man wants to gamble, let him gamble. It’s not up to the government to make that judgment call and decide what is wrong or right. Especially when you outlaw something, it doesn't go away, it just becomes an even bigger problem. You let underground markets take over certain industries and this ends in more people getting hurt.

Let the free market come up with Covid cures, vaccines, treatments, etc. Let free information flow about the efficacy or the dangers of vaccines or other treatments. Let the doctors inform patients. Let the patients make informed decisions without the force of the state. Everything will get better. We will conquer the disease and we will conquer other diseases. We don't have to let the government use the disease as another pretence to give up our individual rights and liberties to give more power to an abusive government.