I have a family member who, despite acknowledging that seat belts work and save lives, refuses to wear his seat belt purely out of petty spite "because I'm not gonna let the tyrannical government tell me what to do!" This endless conversation about vaccines is feeling more and more like that. Orthodox Individualism has become a religion.
Except not wearing a seatbelt harms noone but yourself, and frankly it's up to the individual if they value surviving a car accident.
I've had police tell me the rationalization for seatbelt laws is by minimizing ambulance use in crashes, it saves the lives of others and reduces traffic congestion. This is the reasoning put forth for making not wearing a seatbelt a ticketable offense. Last I checked emergency services like ambulances aren't even considered an essential service provided by the government, yet we're being nickel and dimed by the government on their behalf as something so essential we mustn't unnecessarily affect their availability.
Seat belt laws seem mostly about fundraising for local governments from where I'm sitting. When they have a budget shortfall, suddenly traffic stops are tacking on seat belt tickets like gangbusters.
Over the last 40-some years, Conservatives and Republicans have been incredibly successful at destroying the idea of government which is effective and serves the public. The result is that oppositional defiance and grievance politics are all we have left.
Over the past 40 years elected officials have done a great job of passing legislation that shows they are incompetent, corrupt, and have no ones best interested except their own and will use any excuse to increase their control over people.
This is what I mean by "grievance politics". This is not true, but "feels" like it it is. If Congress has done "a great job of passing legislation", what were the legislative achievements of the Trump administration? How did that government reduce its role in our lives? How did the government "shrink" in any way, which is supposed to be the Republican promise?
Republicans/Conservatives don't think the government should provide for society in the same way that Democrats/Liberals do. It's why Republicans politicized wearing a mask and now vaccination, because it's the government doing things. More importantly, telling them to do things. It's why Republicans universally obstruct the progress of the Democrats (see Mitch McConnell not filling a Supreme Court seat) but the reverse isn't generally true. Republicans don't want to pass much of anything, and many Democrats vote for the things they do.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter who is blamed for corruption and incompetence, it still serves to further the idea that government shouldn't do anything. That's not an option when there's a disease ripping though society, which is why the reaction against vaccination and masking is so strong. It's directly challenging the idea that government and society can be effective at solving a problem if we work together. The Jeffersonian ideal of a weak government presiding over a agrarian society is outdated and not a meaningful model for modern society.
> the idea that government shouldn't do anything. That's not an option when there's a disease ripping though society
Yes it is an option, always. Government always has the option to do nothing and leave people to their own decisions. There is no objective truth that this should ever have been any kind of government issue at all.
If you use an emergency to justify expanding government power, what you get is a perpetual emergency.
> Government always has the option to do nothing and leave people to their own decisions.
Government doing nothing doesn't just leave us to our own decisions, it makes us more vulnerable to the decisions of others. You could even argue that the whole point of a government is to limit the impact that my decisions have on you, and vice versa.
How should this pandemic have been addressed, then? How would "leav[ing] people to their own decisions" address climate change, or any other national/global issue?
