President Joe Biden wants the Occupational Safety & Health Administration to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for all workers at companies with more than 100 employees. Local governments from sea to shining sea, including those of New York City and San Francisco, have conscripted business owners as “vaccination passport” inspectors, forbidding them to serve customers whose papers aren’t in order.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott, on the other hand, are attempting to mandate that businesses may NOT condition employment or patronage on being vaccinated.

The two types of mandates may strike you as very different, but in reality there’s no difference at all. The politicians involved are authoritarians. Their COVID-19 power games are about power, not about COVID-19.

Authoritarian politicians and bureaucrats have spent the last year-and-a-half using the pandemic as an excuse to seize more control over our lives than they ever enjoyed before.

Now they’re loath to give up that power, casting about for any excuse to hold onto it and expand it even further. The corollary of “never let a crisis goes to waste” is “never let a crisis end if there’s any way to keep it going.”

Meanwhile, an economy they cratered with their “public health” measures (none of which have worked as advertised) teeters on the edge.

You’ve seen the empty shelves at your local stores. You’ve seen the yellow “out of gas” bags at your local gas stations. You’ve seen the “limited hours” and “drive-thru only” signs at your local  fast-food restaurants.

Authoritarian politicians and bureaucrats can’t fix those problems. They CAUSED those problems, and anything they do other than sitting down, shutting up, and staying out of the way will make those problems worse, not better.

Worse, not better, is almost certainly where we’re going. Things are shaping up for a crash that may well make the Great Depression look like a pleasure cruise.

And when that crash comes, most Americans will probably willingly cede even MORE power and more authority to those whose power and authority brought the crash about, to “fix” it.

Because, as we all know, the way to get your car repaired is to shove a wad of money at the kid who stole it, took it out for a joy ride, and wrapped it around a telephone pole.

Life won’t get better until we get one fact through our heads: Political government is our enemy, not our friend.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

On October 19, 96-year-old Irmgard Furchner appeared in a German court to answer charges of aiding and abetting 11,412 murders. The murders took place between 1943 and 1945 at the Stutthof concentration camp, where a much younger Furchner worked as secretary to the camp’s commandant.

A day before Furchner’s indictment, Colin Powell, the US government’s 16th national security advisor, 12th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,  and 65th Secretary of State, died at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center from complications related to COVID-19.

Seventy-six years after the end of World War Two, governments are rounding up the last few living Nazi war criminals — nonagenarians and even centenarians who played minor roles in the Holocaust — and hauling them to court for their crimes against humanity.

Eighteen years after the US invasion of Iraq, the ringleaders of THAT crime against humanity are beginning to die off,  in bed, surrounded by their loved ones, eulogized in the press as “leaders” and “statesmen.” Powell was preceded in death this year by former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The process of seeking justice for the victims of Nazism has been long, difficult, and spotty in application, but at least it’s still pursued.

The process of seeking justice for the victims of Powell, Rumsfeld and other architects of the Iraq war — hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, thousands of US troops — hasn’t even begun.

Like Powell, Rumsfeld lied to the American public — and to the world — about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, providing a pretext for war as trumped-up as Hitler’s excuse for Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland.

Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi (famous for throwing his shoes at then-president George W. Bush during a 2008 Baghdad press conference) puts it bluntly: “I am saddened by the death of Colin Powell without being tried for his crimes in Iraq. But I am sure that the court of God will be waiting for him.”

Assurances of a final judgment in the afterlife aside, Powell’s life since 2003 has been a case of justice delayed, his death a case of justice denied.

Other Iraq  war criminals, however, remain at large.

Bush fancies himself an artist these days, when he’s not hobnobbing with Ellen DeGeneres at football games.

Former national security advisor (and Powell’s successor as Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice teaches at Stanford.

Former US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz went on to head the World Bank and currently enjoys a sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute.

And there are others.

They’re not paying for their crimes. They’re not absconding to non-extradition countries one step ahead of arrest and trial. They’re enjoying the good life, seemingly unworried at the prospect of ever facing justice.

That’s something that can, and should, change.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

On October 5, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified before the US Senate, decrying her former employer’s “destructive impact” and warning that “without action, divisive and extremist behaviors we see today are only the beginning.”

Per Haugen’s theory, lack of “action” by social media platforms is the cause of social ills such as violence  in Myanmar and Ethiopia. Because, as we all know, Myanmar and Ethiopia were oases of tranquility before Facebook came along and ruined everything.

What kind of “action” Does Haugen advocate?

Presumably the kind of “robust content modification” US Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) demanded from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last November to combat election  “misinformation.”

And presumably  “robust content modification”  of the kinds of posts that, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted in July, the Biden administration “flags” for Facebook as “problematic” for differing with the administration’s claims about COVID-19 vaccines.

In their early days, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook held themselves out as part of the “public square,” with value sets that at least implicitly included unfettered speech.

That quickly changed as those platforms came up against the need to sell ads.  Mortgage brokers and insurance firm don’t want their ads appearing alongside porn, Holocaust denial, etc.

Which is fine: Their platforms, their rules. It’s not a freedom of speech issue, because they’re not preventing you from saying anything. They’re just deciding whether you get to use their platforms to say it. That’s not censorship. If you don’t like their rules, there are other platforms with different rules (in fact, some with no rules at all).

But, increasingly, the government’s getting involved. Richard Blumenthal and his friends on both sides of the partisan aisle agree that they should get to control what you’re allowed to say. They just disagree on the details.

The Big Two in social media — Facebook and Twitter — are obviously ready to make a deal. In return for government regulation that  protects them from competition by raising the costs of getting into the social media market, they’re willing to suppress speech on behalf of whoever happens to be in charge in Washington, DC.

And that IS censorship.

Richard Stallman tells us to “think of ‘free speech,’ not ‘free beer'” when discussing the free software movement. The marriage of legacy social media platforms to government censorship reverses that proposition. Use of the services is “free” (actually, you pay with your data and attention), but you only get to say what the politicians tell those platforms to allow you to say.

Free speech requires complete separation of social media and state.

The most direct route to that goal would be for politicians to abide by the First Amendment, but that’s obviously not happening.

The less direct route — and the inevitable result of the direct route being closed off — is users moving to social media platforms that aren’t, and in fact can’t be, regulated by government.

Such platforms do exist. Punch “distributed social media platforms” into your preferred search engine to find them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY