So, I've been seeing a lot of crap over the past 1.5 years from the right about mask mandates and now forcing the vaccine being "tyranny", and as a left leaning libertarian, I feel like I gotta weigh in.
Heres the problem with right wing libertarians. They're obsessed with negative liberty. Freedom is never being told what to do, ever. At least the government not telling them what to do as they believe you should still be oppressed by bosses, religion, and family members in a lot of cases. But freedom is a lot more complicated than that.
When I say I'm a libertarian, I would say I like a relatively small amount of government intervention in peoples' lives, sure. But, I'm not an anarchist. Theres a difference between someone who wants relatively limited government, and NO government. Government has a valid reason to restrict behavior in some situations. And what is the standard? Well, I believe you have a right to live as you want as long as your actions aren't harming others. Now, harm can be a bit diverse and complex, and I do tend to take a more left wing approach of understanding my actions impacting others negatively in less than direct ways at time. Preventing the spread of a deadly disease is such a situation.
Look, if you don't wear a mask, and you don't get the vaccine, and you don't socially distance, well, you're harming others. You're spreading the disease without even knowing it in many situations. The purpose of social distancing isn't a communist take over of the economy, or even a way for people like me to force our anti work ideas on people. No, the purpose of social distancing is to minimize unneeded contact between people to minimize the spread of the disease. The purpose of wearing masks isn't some weird cultish "mark of the beast" type thing or whatever, the purpose is to stop the disease from spreading. And vaccines, they are literally designed to prevent the disease. They give you immunity, stopping you from not only getting sick from it, but also from spreading it to others. All of these measures, are ways to stop the virus, and the government mandating such things are ways to achieve the chief, basic mandate for society existing at all, to protect people within that society from harm, and to enhance their physical well being.
If your society can't even guarantee such a thing, well then that society has no legitimate right to exist, which is where I get libertarian on this stuff. But as long as actions taken by the government are valid exercises of power to protect people, and informed by the best scientific evidence available to them at the time, and there's no reasonably less intrusive way to do such things, then that's what they gotta do to protect the citizens.
Your "freedom" to cough in peoples faces and get sick from what is, at this point, an easily preventable disease, does not outweigh my concern to be safe from your germs. It's literally the same principle as "your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose". So I'm sick of the whining and the belly aching. Get the shot, and yes, given how delta is spreading like wildfire and given how it's burning through the unvaccinated like crazy and is even jumping back over at times to those who are vaccinated, I'm genuinely not sympathetic to the perspective on the right these days. Sorry, I'm not. Your freedom to get sick and spread your germs does not trump my freedom to not get sick and die because your stupidity and selfishness spreads a deadly disease. Get the shot, shut the heck up, and let's get back to normal. You guys have been whining for over a year about how you wanna go back to normal, we're not at a point we can go back to normal, and all it requires is getting the shot. So get it, and shut up, so we can all put this behind us.
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