In September of last year, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo boldly announced that the Florida Department of Health that he runs, along with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, would be working to eliminate all vaccine mandates in the state. While Ladapo said some mandates would be eliminated by the state health department, eliminating other mandates, he noted, would require action by the governor and state legislature.
Tag: mandates
Across America in 2020, draconian restrictions were imposed in the name of countering coronavirus at just about every university, even though most college students, being relatively young and healthy, have been at very little risk of serious sickness or death from coronavirus.
Some people said “no thanks” to paying universities to harass and demean them with such restrictions, choosing, instead, to withdraw from or not enter college. Indeed, college enrollment in America is down over six percent — a loss of nearly a million students — since the Fall of 2019 semester that preceded the coronavirus scare. Other people grudgingly put up with the situation and tried to take advantage of opportunities they could find to experience some of the freedom universities were working hard to deny.
In the spring of 2021, many universities began announcing their plans to mandate students take experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots. Some people hoped that the shots mandates would come with the permanent lifting of restrictions. But, at many universities it turned out to be just another requirement added on the pile.
Maybe Texas Governor Greg Abbott was influenced by the billboards that appeared around Texas last month urging people to resist bullying regarding experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots and to instead make their own informed choices. Maybe Abbott perceived the strong opposition among voters to the increasingly harsh measures being taken to push the shots on people. Maybe Abbott’s conscience urged him to act. No matter the reason, Abbott on Monday took a stand for the rights of Texans. Abbott issued an executive order in contradiction to a mandate President Biden announced in September that employers require employees to take the shots. Abbott also added to the agenda of the state legislature’s ongoing special session consideration of legislation similar to the executive order.
One of Robert Higgs’ great contributions to understanding government is his exploration of what he terms the ratchet effect. In a 2011 interview posted at the Mises Institute website, Higgs provided this succinct description of the ratchet effect:
In my work, the ratchet effect describes the characteristic way in which government under modern ideological conditions grows during a perceived national emergency. The government’s size, scope, and power grow abruptly as the government acts to “do something” to allay the threat. Then, as the threat is eliminated or diminished, the government shrinks, but not all the way to the level it would have reached if the crisis had not occurred. Hence, each crisis shifts the government’s growth trajectory to a higher level of size, scope, and power.
Texas Governor Gregg Abbott said in an interview this week with host Bill Hemmer at Fox News that Abbott has not yet received an apology from United States President Joe Biden for some negative things Biden said when Abbott on March 2 announced the ending of state-level coronavirus-related mandates in Texas.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has throughout the coronavirus scare been imposing unilaterally in her state one of the harshest coronavirus crackdowns in America. On Sunday, she imposed new extreme restrictions on people in Michigan, announced sweeping shutdowns of many ordinary human activities for the next three weeks via a new order being imposed in the name of countering coronavirus.
Last week the Wisconsin Supreme Court became the first among the highest state courts in America to void much of a state government’s coronavirus crackdown. With legal challenges being pursued in response to liberty suppression through the expanding of government power across America in the name of countering coronavirus, expect other states’ top courts soon to be considering the legality of state and local crackdowns as well. A declaration earlier this month by four of the nine justices of the Texas Supreme Court suggests that there may be strong support in that court for taking similar action as did the Wisconsin Supreme Court.