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The Authoritarian Impulse: North Carolina
I don’t know whether this is going to be a series, or not, but it could be. Examples of the authoritarian impulse are everywhere. But today I was struck by a quote that Roy Cooper, the Democrat governor of North Carolina, included in his veto message of Senate Bill 173, the Free the Smiles Act:
“Passing laws for political purposes that encourage people to pick and choose which health rules they want to follow is dangerous and could tie the hands of public health officials in the future.”
The context for this statement is that the Free the Smiles Act would have enabled parents state-wide to decide whether their child would wear a mask in school. The fig leaf for the veto was the fact that North Carolina had passed a law last year making masking a school board by school board decision, which meant certain districts imposed mask mandates while others did not. Thus parents were free to lobby their school boards but not empowered to make the decision for their families.
Let’s unpack the governor’s message: encouraging “people to pick and choose which health rules they want to follow is dangerous….” Does he really mean that? Yes, as it “could tie the hands of public health officials”. The reason that we have (had) a Bill of Rights is that government action is inherently inimical to individual rights. Government is always and ever acting on behalf of the “group”, not the individual. In government actions, individuals always give way to the group. And the best way to achieve that is to act as if there are no rights, only government-issued privileges that can be granted or withdrawn.
Our courts need to step up. Emergencies that justify suspension of individual liberty must be limited in time, location, and scope. Two years on into an “emergency” makes that word meaningless. It has become like obscenity — it can’t be defined but government “knows it when it sees it“.
Pray that the G-d who gave us our rights saves us from the foolish who empower government to take them away.
Published in General
Sounds like an excellent reason to pass the law. Put this quote on all the campaign literature when the bill is reintroduced.
What is happening in Canada is an example of having no control over your own health decisions, and the consequences of giving those over you too much power. All these truckers wanted to do was work. How many injections now qualify you to cross state lines or for that matter, travel world-wide – two, three, four, annual? This is not about a vaccine. It’s an excuse to lower the control grid. I read a story this morning about digital health passports – if you peel back the onion, you’ll see those behind it. Create a crisis, then introduce the remedies. I had to look up who mitre was – that’s a big one and they are involved in the passports. Read their origins back to 1958. They may say (gov.) ok – we won’t do the health passports now……it’s still an option, but look what a great idea (Microsoft is always in there somewhere as is Google) ……..then they’ll be some sort of economic crisis – introduce another “remedy” – digital banking. Now we’re forced to have a digital ID to buy and sell, comply, get healthcare, travel, work. It’s the WEF agenda 2030 goal:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2022/02/24/national-vaccine-quietly-rolled-out/?sh=516031836be6
We hear this same “tie the hands” argument when law enforcement bureaucrats says that prohibiting civil assets forfeiture would tie their hands in dealing with criminals. Yes, it would. There are all sorts of things in our constitutional system that tie the hands of police. That’s usually a feature, not a bug. We try to strike a balance between safety and freedom, and you don’t do that without tying the hands of the public safety agencies to limit their ability to act. We can argue about how tightly those hands should be tied. Obviously they shouldn’t be immobilized. But to oppose restraints on the grounds that they are restraints is not a good argument.
Yes, we WANT to tie the hands of “public health” officials in the future. Hell, we want to tie them NOW!
In Texas, there was a lot of confusion as towns and counties were busy imposing or not imposing mask mandates. The Governor stepped in and pre-empted all those local edicts. Tied their hands, as it were. This was criticized as Neanderthal compared with enlightened states like California.
So how did it go? The very busy and productive Ian Miller shows us.
^^^^^ THIS ^^^^^ a thousand times over.
No limiting principle. We say it’s an emergency, so get in line. Confusion is bad for science. It’s good for teachers unions. And if you don’t like choices, just wait a couple of years to vote me out. Roy is as big a hack as you can get away with in North Carolina.
Would these be the same public health officials who hurt those same people with the 90 percent of their health rules that were harmful, oppressive, and ineffective against Covid?
I agree with your assessment of the governor’s words, but if COVID were 30% fatal for children if contracted, would that change anything? That is, if public health officials stated that a mask would bring the fatality down to, say, 5%, would that be OK for local governments, indeed the State, to require masks?
Were that all true and if the same officials also had a good track record of competence and honesty, then they wouldn’t need a requirement.
You mean, people would automatically wear masks because of the danger, right? If that’s the case, what about those people who are innumerate and decide to go without a mask?
The problem is that masks in practice don’t do anything for an aerosol virus, and that claim would be specious.
Innumerate people, by and large, are able to trust the trustworthy and to follow social cues and rituals. Confucius is correct. Using the public-domain translation by James Legge:
In other words, I seriously doubt there is any need for a mask mandate even in the fictional scenario you describe, even for the innumerate.
All the same, if you want a direct answer to the question whether it would be morally permissible were the circumstances different, I think it probably would be. And if not, just change the scenario a bit; make it an airborne Ebola that you can stop with masks! I could support a mask mandate for something like that.
I think the more accurate statement would be that we can’t let public officials pick and choose pretexts for exercising powers they were not given by law.
That’s a good statement, but keep in mind that in many cases, public officials were given wide ranging emergency powers by law, without adequate checks in place.
North Carolina Covid has peaked and is declining hard. Statewide positive tests are down to 7%, hospitalization that was persistently above 10,000 is now about 1,000. No word on how many are K-12 age, which tells me that the number is statistically insignificant. In view of the fact that there have been outdoor, packed football games for several months without crazy outbreaks, I think the time has long passed for doing away with mask mandates. We had enough evidence in mid September for the health authorities to end the mandates.
When the health authorities undermine their own authority by deliberately overstating the harm of a contagion, the public is justified in ignoring their hyperbolic warnings and remedies. This is normal American behavior, the likes of which a Democrat governor cannot recognize because it is the personal evaluation of rational individuals. If you want health authorities’ recommendations to be respected, they have to play it straight, they must allow for civilized debate and input from practicing physicians. They have done this to themselves, and an honest governor would admonish them for it and promise to call them out when they are obviously overstating the danger of the pathogen and recommending preventative measures that do not work.
But no. Liberals want everything to be either mandatory or outlawed.
As sad as the whole Covid 19 episode has been, it has given us a lot of insight into the governing beliefs of Democrats (and liberal half wits like Trudeau.) There’s an assumption that they’re right, that anyone who disagrees with them is mendacious, a challenge to their unending authority. And the mask mandate is everyday proof that they were wrong. Really wrong. An ounce of humility would go a long way, but I’m not holding my breath.
Now, lets get back to climate change and white supremacy.
De Santios bill gave the Governor authority to pass medical executive orders for as long as they wanted. It pisses me off how lazy conservative media is. They don’t even bother to read the actual laws the Republicans are passing in Florida giving more and more power to the Governor when it should be less at all levels. They did not learn the lesson of the Executive branch having to much power in other states.
@brianclendinen, could you post a link to the bill you referenced. I would like to read it myself.