That people consider civil unrest because they're told to wear masks for a few months in order to prevent countless deaths is more a sign of a broken culture than anything else.
This is a US specific phenomenon, and it's not a new one. I will further argue it is a critical principle for Democracy.
The issue is not being asked to wear a mask, the issue is legally mandating them.
I can ask you to donate money to a political party - you may say no, but me asking is perfectly fine. If I force you under duress to donate - well, that's something else, isn't it?
Freedom is the ability to say no, even if that isn't an optimal choice. Taking that freedom away leads to bad outcomes like arresting people for unpopular views and sending Muslims to "re-education" camps.
I assume you're also against seatbelt and helmet laws. What about those laws applying to children? What about smoking laws?
The US already has numerous laws that few people complain about because they've come to recognize them as necessary for the public good. But that was only after they were passed and enforced.
Likewise, kids do not have rights the same way an adult does. The government can compel education until you're 18 (thankfully).
We do not have laws because they are good. It is the case that some laws are good, but we have laws because the goal of governments is to govern the people. The difference between a democracy and an oligarch is the source of that right.
I have no special rights over you. I am not any better, I am not empowered by any god or special bloodline. I, if elected in a democracy, can pass laws but I can't limit your rights. I can't compel you to worship somebody, limit what you say or take your property - even if I have a good reason.
Well, being good and for the public good are separate concepts in my mind. That aside, you never addressed the smoking, seatbelt or helmet laws with regard to adults. Permissible or not?
Smoking laws are restrictions. You can't smoke within 30ft of an eating establishment or in a car with a child. You want to go home and chain smoke yourself to cancer? Have fun. Likewise, you couldn't restrict smoking at home typically.
Seatbelt and helmet laws are a condition of using property that isn't yours (the road). Likewise for drivers licenses and minimum road hours.
A good case here is the Texas anti-sodomy law (Lawrence v Texas) that was struck down in 2006(!) after being used to go after gay men. Here Texas made claims it was acting for the public good, SC ruled the state had no presence on a private matter outside the public eye.
> Seatbelt and helmet laws are a condition of using property that isn't yours (the road).
"Mask laws" are a condition of using property that isn't yours (the road, the town square, the park, the trail). Nobody is going to force you to wear on mask on your own property.
There is no "government" as an owner of anything. Anything not owned by individuals (within the USA) is owned by some sector of the public (either the entire nation, or a state, or a city etc. etc.). Governments do not own courthouses, they do not own national parks.
Governments are the structures we use to make decisions about legal, economic and social policy. They are not owners - the public is.
But I've forgotten your posting history, so I can't really tell if we're in violent agreement or if you're just flipping your terminology around.
> Seatbelt and helmet laws are a condition of using property that isn't yours (the road).
In England, at least, the law also applies in the (somewhat unusual) circumstances that you happen to own the road.
Going meta here: There seems to be a mental condition that causes people to try to interpret everything in terms of contracts and property rights. In extreme cases it leads to phenomena like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_on_the_land
You seem to be changing the argument rather than answering the question. Do you believe public decency laws are the result of the state overextending its hand?
You are doging the question, maybe because you realize that you can't answer it without lying or contradicting yourself. Do you agree with the fact that you are compelled to wear clothes? After all a mask is essentially clothing.
Nobody checks these conditions when I use the roads. I could be a tax avoider and my use of the roads is unimpeded. Arrest of my use of the roads is consequent to being arrested for tax noncompliance, but I am not expressly forbidden from use of the roads.
Indeed, I could go live under a bridge and never pay taxes, and I would still be able to access and use roads.
Visa holders, undocumented immigrants, and more can use the roads. People without jobs, teenagers, etc. can use the roads. Your point is made without evidence and without observational adherence to reality as I've experienced it.
Do you have a source you can direct me to showing me the requirement that any publicly (taxpayer) funded road is only usable by taxpayers?
> the requirement that any publicly (taxpayer) funded road is only usable by taxpayers?
I never stated any such requirement.
What I did say was that taxpayers have a right to use public roads. That is not the same as saying anyone else is prohibited from using them. The latter is a matter of how we choose to make public policy.
Our current public policy is that anyone is, in practice, allowed to use public roads, whether they are taxpayers or not. We could choose a different, more restrictive public policy regarding non-taxpayers, but we don't. (That is probably, as I said before, because it's not worth the cost to check everyone using public roads to see their taxpayer status.)
But we cannot, at least not based on the legal principle I stated, choose a public policy that does not allow taxpayers to use public roads, since they have a right to do so.
> Yes, you do, if you're a member of the public and a taxpayer.
The idea that being a taxpayer gives you an innate right of use of government resources is bizarre. Being a citizen gives you an innate right of supervision, of course, but being a taxpayer doesn't add anything to that, and supervision isn't use.
> The idea that being a taxpayer gives you an innate right of use of government resources is bizarre.
They're not "government resources", they're public resources. We all collectively own them. The government is an agent that we use to manage those resources, but it doesn't own them. The public does.
They are public resources that the public has elected to administer through the government. It is possible to have resources that are public because there are no constraints on their use, but the two types of public resources are not the same.
> We all collectively own them.
In much the same way that corporate shareholders collectively own the assets of a corporation. And, for much the same reason as this is not true of corporate shareholders and corporate resources, the constituents of a government don't each individually have the right to arbitrarily use the resources administered by government on behalf of the public.
> The government is an agent that we use to manage those resources, but it doesn't own them. The public does.
The public collectively does, but being a 1/~300millionth owner doesn't give you the right to arbitrarily use resources so owned in contravention of the direction of the management agent employed by all ~300 million owners to protect their interests.
> In much the same way that corporate shareholders collectively own the assets of a corporation.
A public road is not the same as, say, a factory. As a shareholder in a corporation, I have no use for a factory, and the factory is not built for direct use by anyone. It is built to produce things that get sold, and as a shareholder I get a piece of the proceeds. (Actually it's often much more complicated than that, but going into all the current problems with corporate governance would take way too long.) But a public road is built with public money for the direct use of the public.
> being a 1/~300millionth owner doesn't give you the right to arbitrarily use resources so owned in contravention of the direction of the management agent employed by all ~300 million owners to protect their interests
The management agent is still just an agent. Yes, I myself am only a 1/~300 millionth owner of the public roads, but I have the same right to use them as the other ~300 million owners. The management agent cannot arbitrarily deny or restrict that right of usage to any of the owners. All it can do is manage the roads: build them, maintain them, repair them, and assess taxes to cover the costs of doing those things.
At least, that's the legal doctrine that should be in place in a free country. Of course it's not the one that's in place in the US at present. To me that's a bug, not a feature.
I think the confusion stems from the fact that US citizens are used to thinking of "the government" not as their representative but as an independent agent that has its own interests that don't necessarily align with their own interests. A powerful institution that can compel them to do things they don't like. Sort of like banks.
This is something that has always made me wonder. The libertarian ideal of "less government" makes more sense if one sees the government as above, an independent agent with its own interests. As a citizen of an EU nation, the way I think of it is that voters elect a government to represent them, so "less government" means "less power to voters to represent themselves". But to libertarians it means "more freedom".
So when the government compels you to "shelter in place", social-distance, wear a mask and so on, it is clearly not doing that because it is trying to protect you, because government is not an agent that has your own best interests in mind, but its own. Instead, it's trying to take away your freedom, because that is what government does, it takes away your freedoms.
That's my best explanation, as someone who has never lived in the US. In any case it's clear that the question of "mask or no mask" has become politicised by being caught up in this peculiar interpretation of "freedom". Which is very unfortunate because it's not a political matter, whether everyone wearing masks makes it less likely that anyone will catch the virus. It's a practical matter and what is necessary is a practical decision. But such practical decisions cannot be taken when everything has to be politicised.
> I think the confusion stems from the fact that US citizens are used to thinking of "the government" not as their representative but as an independent agent that has its own interests that don't necessarily align with their own interests.
I think the confusion is on the other side, and stems from the fallacy of division, wherein people mistakenly treat what is true of the public collectively as true of members of the public individually.
> such practical decisions cannot be taken when everything has to be politicised.
But what politicizes it is precisely the fact that the government is making the decision for everybody, instead of letting each free person make the decision for themselves. If the government didn't force its decision on everybody, then it would not be politicized at all. It would just be a practical decision, exactly as you say.
> US citizens are used to thinking of "the government" not as their representative but as an independent agent that has its own interests that don't necessarily align with their own interests.
US citizens are (or should be) used to thinking of the first as the ideal and the second as the reality. The reason we favor limited goverment is that we know the reality will never measure up to the ideal, so the best we can do is to limit the extent to which we make the attempt.
> As a citizen of an EU nation, the way I think of it is that voters elect a government to represent them, so "less government" means "less power to voters to represent themselves".
Again, this is the ideal, but the reality is that "less government" means "less opportunity for the government to advance its own interests to the detriment of the people". There is simply no way to eliminate the inherent conflict of interest that arises whenever you give some humans the power to dictate what other humans have to do or not do, and that's what a government is.
> when the government compels you to "shelter in place", social-distance, wear a mask and so on, it is clearly not doing that because it is trying to protect you, because government is not an agent that has your own best interests in mind, but its own. Instead, it's trying to take away your freedom, because that is what government does, it takes away your freedoms.
I realize that some people's rhetoric frames it this way, but the actual conflict of interest is deeper and does not require a conscious intention on the part of government officials to take away people's freedoms.
The actual conflict of interest in a situation like the current one is that government officials can't predict the future, yet they know they are going to be held responsible for bad things that happen, because they know many people have this idea that the government is supposed to act in the people's best interest. Government officials cannot prevent bad things from happening, because they're not omniscient or omnipotent and no central authority can possibly know all of the individual circumstances in each situation. They can't possibly balance all the tradeoffs for each individual person. No central authority can. So the best they can do is minimize the chance that they will get blamed for the bad things that do happen. They are less likely to get blamed for issuing draconian orders to stay at home, wear masks, etc., and jailing people for non-compliance, than they are for letting indiivdual citizens use their best judgment in their individual situation. So they do the former and not the latter.
But from the standpoint of an individual citizen like me, I know I am a better judge of my individual situation than the government, so if my judgment of what's best for me conflicts with what the government is ordering everybody to do, I am going to have a severe problem. And in a country of hundreds of millions of people, there are going to be a lot of people in that situation. And if it's supposed to be a free country, having a lot of people in that situation is simply intolerable.
For example, my wife knows a woman whose grandmother recently died in a nursing home. The grandmother was ill and family members, including the woman my wife knows, wanted to visit her before she died. The nursing home would not allow it because of the government lockdown orders, even though all the family members agreed to wear masks, protective equipment, wash their hands, etc., etc. In short, the government took away what should be an inviolable right of people to pay their last respects to a loved one, and to have loved ones with them when they die. It does not help at all to say that the government has to go by the greatest good for the greatest number and some people are bound to be negatively affected. To a person who truly understands what freedom means, that's no better than Stalin's famous remark that to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. People are not eggs.
Current law does not allow you to do this, yes. But current law also allows you to be ticketed if you exceed the speed limit. So obviously not all of current law is consistent with the basic principle I have stated. The application of the basic principle I stated to these cases should be obvious.
(Btw, it seems a little odd for you to be saying, on the one hand, that certain current laws are wrong--such as the 65 mph speed limit--and on the other hand to be relying on other current laws for your understanding of what "rights" you have. Surely you should apply the same principles to all of the laws?)
> Can you legally walk down a highway?
I actually don't know what the law is on this one. The application of the basic principle I stated to this case, as to the ones above, should be obvious.
Current law in much of the US absolutely allows this, as long as you aren't on a public road or private property where the owner has opted-in to the rules generally applicable to public roads.
Of course, most of the interesting trips a person might want to take by car involve traversing public roads.
I don't think the government should be able to make smoking outright illegal (except on government property like government buildings), but I think owners of individual homes and businesses and public spaces (e.g., malls) should have the right to prohibit it, with violations of the owner's prohibition being punishable by law (similar to how, say, trespassing would be handled).
> I assume you're also against seatbelt and helmet laws.
Laws that allow you to be fined or punished simply for not wearing a seat belt or a helmet? Yes, those are wrong.
Laws that impose extra liability on you if you are in an accident and cause harm (including harm to yourself) and aren't wearing a seatbelt or a helmet? Those would be fine. Indeed, people would probably be more likely to wear seatbelts and helmets under such a regime than they are now. Now they're just risking a fine. Under that regime they'd be risking, for example, not having their medical insurance cover the costs of treating them.
"Laws that allow you to be fined or punished simply for not wearing a seat belt or a helmet? Yes, those are wrong."
Why should I have to pay, through increased insurance and other societal costs, for your increased economic burden if you are paralyzed or run up huge medical bills because you could not be bothered to wear a seatbelt?
> Why should I have to pay, through increased insurance and other societal costs, for your increased economic burden if you are paralyzed or run up huge medical bills because you could not be bothered to wear a seatbelt?
Go back and read the second part of my post, which you failed to quote, which addresses exactly this issue.
> Indeed, people would probably be more likely to wear seatbelts and helmets under such a regime than they are now. Now they're just risking a fine. Under that regime they'd be risking, for example, not having their medical insurance cover the costs of treating them.
That is not how people work. They never think it will happen to them.
