Just like I’ve never had (until recently) any reason to define capitalism, I also have never felt any need to define libertarianism.
Some people use the non-aggression principle, but that strikes me as more of a statement about how we should behave.
What if we’re trying to define the rules for libertarian governance?
In that case, my definition is very much based on property rights. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours, and we both have the right to engage (or to not engage) in voluntary exchange.
I realize that’s not the most elegant or comprehensive statement of principles, but I think it provides a useful framework for the debate over vaccine mandates.
Regarding that issue, I’m glad that private companies had the expertise and opportunity to develop vaccines against the coronavirus, and I got vaccinated as soon as possible.
That being said, I definitely don’t think government should force anyone to make that choice.
But I also think that people who opt against vaccination should accept the non-governmental consequences.
Here’s some of what I wrote about this topic back in April.
What if private businesses decide that customers are only allowed if they prove they’ve been vaccinated? From a libertarian perspective, guided by core principles such as property rights and freedom of association, that should be totally acceptable. And that’s true even if we think the owners of the businesses are making silly choices. After all, it’s their property.
The Dispatch has an article on this controversy.
Written by Andrew Egger, it starts by pointing out that there’s a political fight in South Dakota because a private company has announced that all employees must be vaccinated.
South Dakota’s largest employer is Sanford Health, a hospital and health care system that employs nearly 10,000 people in the eastern half of the state. On July 22, Sanford, which operates in both Dakotas and Minnesota, announced it would begin requiring all its employees to get vaccinated for COVID by November 1. Within weeks, two Republican members of the state House, Reps. Jon Hansen and Scott Odenbach, had introduced legislation punching back. The COVID-19 Vaccine Freedom of Conscience Act would give South Dakotans “the right to be exempt from any COVID-19 vaccination mandate, requirement, obligation, or demand on the basis that receiving a COVID-19 vaccination violates his or her conscience.” …By the end of August, state House Speaker Spencer Gosch had come aboard the mandate ban effort as well. …The only problem: Noem doesn’t support the legislation.
Why is Governor Kristi Noem against the legislation?
For a very libertarian reason. She doesn’t think the government has the right to tell a private company how to operate.
…the laissez-faire approach that made Noem a conservative folk hero in last year’s fights has gotten her crosswise with her fellow Republicans on the issue of vaccine mandate bans. “Frankly, I don’t think businesses should be mandating that their employees should be vaccinated,” she said in a video posted to Twitter last week. “And if they do mandate vaccines to their employees, they should be making religious and other exemptions available to them. But I don’t have the authority as governor to tell them what to do.”
Amen.
If you believe in private property, the owners of a business should have the right to decide whom they employ and whom they do business with.
Just as consumers can choose where to shop and workers can choose to leave jobs they don’t like.
Here’s a final excerpt from the article.
“Nobody is stopping you from making that decision [not to get vaccinated], but you don’t have a right to a particular job,” Noem spokesman Ian Fury told The Dispatch. “The business owner has the right to his business. You do not have a right to an individual job, because you don’t own that business.” …Philosophically, that puts Noem firmly in the camp of free-market Republicans past: largely content to preside passively over a state economy in which companies are free to set their own standards of conduct and employees are free to work for companies that share their values—and quit jobs if they don’t.
The bottom line is that libertarians (and small-government conservatives) should not be upset about private companies making private decisions.
Instead, we should get irked when politicians try to mandate those decisions.
In a column for the Washington Examiner, Quin Hillyer condemns Joe Biden’s recent declaration that companies either must require vaccination or conduct constant testing.
President Joe Biden’s decision to require large private employers to ensure their workers are vaccinated or tested for the coronavirus is problematic not just in terms of the Constitution, statutes, and liberty interests, but it is also highly impractical. …This is crazy. If the onus is on the businesses, what are businesses to do if employees refuse to comply? Fire them all? …This rule is a recipe for lawsuits. Will businesses be caught in a bind — penalized for unvaccinated workers but also charged with unfair labor practices if they evade the mandate by reducing payrolls below 100? …If massive new testing is required as a mere screening method, even for those feeling perfectly healthy, how will medical personnel keep up? Who will keep administrative tabs on all this? And if businesses are required to provide time off for workers to get tested, how will their own efficiency and productivity suffer?
Given the fact that Biden is a career politician with no experience in the private sector, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by this White House proposal.
After all this is an Administration that thinks copying the failed fiscal policies of Greece, France, and Italy is how you “build back better.”
Though sympathetic toward all who would rather not be needled at gunpoint, the issue is clearly exploited by zealots who seek to drive women into involuntary labor at gunpoint. Rather than stand downwind of mystical fascists and be misidentified as their collaborationist, I’ll be looking to repeal Comstock laws while The Inquisition is busily burning witch doctors at the stake on an issue of convenience to them. Vichy France is not where I want to live.
[…] Vaccine Mandates, Property Rights, and Libertarianism […]
I don’t think health care delivery can ever be discussed in the framework of libertarian principles. 99%of the people DYING OF COVID are people who are NOT VACCINATED. But the actual problem is the clogging up of hospital facilities by large number of cases. And the society is NOT SO INHUMAN as to simply refuse anyone medical service.
People are welcome to question number of fatalities but the best remedy is to quickly go to the nearest hospital and ask how many vacant beds are there now and how many were there say three years ago.
People are welcome to distrust big pharma but more than a billion people have been vaccinated world wide.
The government mandates must be questioned but based on their logic not arguments based on libertarianism.
Just as an example, the current practice of preventing travel from a highly vaccinated Europe and allowing them from many other third world countries is stupid to say the least. Mask mandates for the vaccinated are questionable. But not because they violate property rights.
The US has a constitution that is not easily amended, a good thing over all. But everyone both the parties try to use questionable methods to impose their policies in all areas and COVID rules are no exception.
When govt obliterates professionals who refuse to vax via licensing regimes, Dan will bemoan the increased costs and walled gardens of occupational licenses. Dan hates paying his plumber more than minimum wage after all. Meanwhile individual rights are being shit upon by government when it outsources them, short-circuiting the logic of every fagtron libertard possible.
queux
The numbers are inflated. The CDC counts all COVID, Flu and Pneumonia deaths together. Since the Flu & Pneumonia typically kill 50,000 a year each and COVID 19 has been around for two years, the combined Flu & Pneumonia deaths are around 200,000. Add to that the deaths that weren’t from COVID that hospitals reported as COVID to get the $30,000 per COVID death bonus. Don’t forget that liberal icons like Andrew Cuomo caused deaths with his horrible practices.
I have to wonder if you support the civil rights act of 1964. By your philosophy, that a business shouldn’t be mandated by the government how to act, you would have to be against that law.
By the way, your quote of Walter Williams above is dead wrong. From the beginnings of history people got rich by trade which was successful in as much the merchants were lucky to avoid plunder by bandits or the local tyran.
Nothing more iliberal than not respecting the other. The ultimate lack of respect is to kill someone purposefully or by negligence. Not accepting vaccination in a pandemics amounts to becoming a potential assassin!
Lets face reality! We don´t live in a libertarian Rothbardian world. We got hundreds of examples of people regretting their libertarian musings when it is too late on their death beds! The government is trying to stop a pandemics that killed more than 650.000 people. The best way to stop it is to have about 90% of the population vaccinated quickly. There is no natural herd immunity by survival; because too many people would die on the way, the virus will mutate and you can catch it again, immunity acquired by getting contaminated wanes, etc.
You are not free to go out on the street naked because you feel hot. You cannot pass the red traffic light because you are in a hurry. If you do you get arrested and you don´t call it fascism! You are not free to spread a deadly virus because you feel fine and want to go for a beer.
I agree that it is very tricky for the government to mandate businesses to enforce vaccination. It is the job of the government to enforce vaccination and protect its sane citizens. Would you agree to it if we had a poll and the majority voted for mandatory vaccination?
[…] Source: Vaccine Mandates, Property Rights, and Libertarianism | International Liberty […]
I agree that the private sector should set its own rules. More attention needs to be paid to government coercion and much more attention to enforcement and threats of punishment. Can the government change the terms of business or a contract without the legislature imposing terms. If so, what standard of medical or other necessity must it meet? Can penalties be imposed without legislation? The non-aggression principle is a standard of how the government should behave. Private individuals and associations should be aggressive or passive as they think best.
Dan: You’re essentially standing on a principle which is nearly irrelevant to the dilemma faced by a majority of Americans. Mega corps are being coerced by the federal government to mandate their employees be vaccinated. This isn’t a situation where a mom ‘an pop establishment is demanding this. The federal government is circumventing legal process to leverage private businesses to achieve that which would otherwise be unconstitutional. That’s not Libertarianism, Dan, that’s called Fascism. If you don’t see that, you’re being willfully ignorant. So, it’s not a situation in which consumers or labor “vote with their dollars,” or “learn a new skill.” The Feds – that is, the Government – are deliberately making life as impossible as possible for anyone who doesn’t want to be a lab rat in a global science experiment. Faced with such overwhelming force – at the barrel of a gun, and denied virtually all means of legal challenges, the public looks to what few remaining leaders they have to defend them with governmental protection from a governmentally created employment crisis and tyranny. There’s nothing laissez faire about these mandates, and they aren’t spontaneously occurring by decentralized business owners. It is being driven by governmental actors and oligarchs. Your solutions are absolutely absurd. “Just live with the consequences, peasant; Charles Koch wants you taking that vaxx. You can take it, or you can….uh……pump gas or sling hash, assuming the government doesn’t coerce businesses to create a vaxx passport (which is totally, OK, btw, because it’s really a *private* business which will be issuing the app/passport), in which case you will starve inside your home.”