Representative Jon Hansen (R-25/Dell Rapids) pops off this long weekend with this profound misunderstanding of civil liberties and concentration camps:
No, my little Aryan friend, a business requiring employees to obtain a free and effective vaccine to prevent a highly communicable and harmful disease is not a bit like mocking the Jews as you cart them into the camps where you will kill them.
A vaccine mandate, like many other mandates our civil society imposes, enhances everyone’s civil liberties:
- As the ACLU op-ed says, vaccine mandates protect the civil liberties of vulnerable individuals who have legitimate, non-political reasons that prevent them from getting the vaccine by maximizing the number of people around them who are fully protected and far less likely to endanger them with an easily preventable infection.
- Vaccine mandates reduce the exposure of all workers and customers to coronavirus, allowing workers and customers greater liberty in entering places of business and engaging in commerce.
- Vaccine mandates allow employers to prevent the spread of disease while forgoing far more intrusive measures like weekly or daily covid testing, quarantines, and contact tracing.
- Vaccine mandates increase overall vaccination rates, speeding the end of the pandemic and a return to normal life in which we may exercise our civil liberties in public life to the fullest.
- Mandating that we all pay taxes on our peanut butter provides the revenue we need to pay legislators and judges to protect our civil liberties.
- Mandating that we pay taxes to the city of Aberdeen ensures that Aberdeen can run plows in the winter to clear our streets so we can all go out and exercise our civil liberties to work, learn, and recreate on the icy tundra from November through March.
- Mandating that political candidates report their contributions to the public protects the civil liberties of all citizens, at least a little bit, by allowing us to keep track of who is supporting the people asking for our vote, whose bidding those candidates might do, and whose civil liberties might be endangered if those candidates win.
- Mandating that drivers obtain licenses promotes public safety, which allows more citizens to enjoy their civil liberties without interruption from injury and death caused by unqualified drivers.
- Mandating that voters register protects our right to vote from fraudsters and corrupt politicians who would abuse their power to steal our elections. (I’m trying to speak a little language that Republicans understand.)
- Mandating that children attend school ensures that more people understand what their civil liberties are, how to exercise them properly as members of a community, and how to distinguish real government overreach into their personal lives (like the many unconstitutional bills sponsored by Rep. Jon Hansen) from the reasonable limitations we place on everyone’s freedom to turn the anarchy of the state of nature into the true liberty of the social contract.
Not all mandates are good. A surfeit of mandates can restrict freedom, but a complete absence of mandates leaves us in that state of nature I mentioned above, anarchy in which we have no civil liberties because there is no civil order to guarantee them against thuggery and catastrophe. The society we seek necessarily balances mandates and personal choice. Unfortunately, Representative Hansen thinks that balance is found solely within his ego: mandate everything I want others to do, and don’t mandate anything I don’t want to do.
Civil liberties do not exist without mandates.
Mandating vaccines in workplaces protects the civil liberties of all whom those workplaces employ and serve.
Vaccines are the surest way set us all free from the current pandemic.
Everything’s like the Holocaust, except the Holocaust, which according to the Charlottesville crowd at least, wasn’t that bad…
– Vaccine mandates date back to the late 1800’s smallpox outbreak.
– In 1905 SCOTUS decided that local authorities have every right to mandate vaccines.
– Schools and the military have mandated inoculations for decades.
– Government telling people what to do is inherent in a civilized society.
– Health officials inspect restaurants for foodborne bacteria.
– No one will be held down and vaccinated. You can get regular testing but the cost is your own.
Jon Hansen sounds a bit like “ich bin Wiesel” to me. I was born in Dell Rapids, it sure has gone downhill.
This man is too stupid to hold elective office.
A tweet is hardly a place where a rational discussion can be held about laws and regulations, as Hansen proved. For example, why is Hansen a member of the state Legislature, a body that exists in the South Dakota Constitution to make “mandates?” Yet, he mocks the very necessity of people to form governments by the consent of the governed. Is he un-American? Didn’t he learn about the Mayflower Compact? If he really believes in what he tweeted, he would resign, and go live in Somalia or some other place where there is nothing but the arbitrary anarchy of the drooling warlords, because that’s what you get when government doesn’t exist to mandate behavior. The fact is he doesn’t believe his tweet. He’s more than willing to create mandates that suit him. He’s more than willing to take away South Dakotan’s freedom to initiated laws, mandating away that Constitutional process with his arbitrary “mandated” bureaucracy. Hansen is lazy. Rather than make a rational argument involving science and policy, he’s throwing out ridiculousness for the dumb crowd.
A tweet is hardly a place where a rational discussion can be held about laws and regulations, as Hansen proved. For example, why is Hansen a member of the state Legislature, a body that exists in the South Dakota Constitution to make “mandates?” Yet, he mocks the very necessity of people to form governments by the consent of the governed. Is he un-American? Didn’t he learn about the Mayflower Compact? If he really believes in what he tweeted, he would resign, and go live in Somalia or some other place where there is nothing but the arbitrary anarchy of the drooling warlords, because that’s what you get when government doesn’t exist to mandate behavior. The fact is he doesn’t believe his tweet. He’s more than willing to create mandates that suit him. He’s more than willing to take away South Dakotan’s freedom to initiated laws, mandating away that Constitutional process with his arbitrary “mandated” bureaucracy. Hansen is lazy. Rather than make a rational argument involving science and policy, he’s throwing out ridiculousness for the dumb crowd.
Another graduate of the USD school of law wu0 gives evidence that it is really a sanctuary for those in need of severe remediation. He is a discredit to the state and the legal profession. And makes one wonder if the school that spawned him is really accredited, Rather than receive the remedial care he needs, he writes and applies the laws of the state. ˙He needs a dose of the real Dachau, although not much registers on minds like his.
wu0 should obviously be who.
I don’t know if you can lay the blame on the USD Law School for Hanson’s blissful ignorance of the history of tyranny. He’s probably just intellectually slothful and looking to curry favor with the Noemites. Lay the blame on the folks who elected this dolt to public office.
Mr. Hansen is very young, Mr. Newquist. Please blog us your take, but fret not about such a fellow who has clearly gotten your goat. Give us your take.
That phrase was written at the entrance to Auschwitz. There are some sufferings that are so great that it is never acceptable liken yours to them. In that vein, Auschwitz is like the holy grail of suffering and should be off limits. Having to get a shot, or wear a mask, or refrain from smoking in public, whatever…it’s not the same as being ripped from your home, having your children starved to death in front of you, put to death, and dumped in a mass grave. Any comparison undermines the horror.
The phrase was over the entry way to almost all the camps, national socialist efficiency.
As another quipped, it’s time to leave the anti-vaxers and anti-vaccine mandate people behind.
They are a drain on our society and culture.
They are holding us back.
Only when we cut them loose will we be able to progress.
Covid kills a far high proportion of rural folks:
They are older, fatter, dumber, less vaccinated.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1280369?__twitter_impression=true