employer vaccine mandates

an italian problem and an alamaba solution.

italy, with its strict labor laws, seems to be struggling with the idea of employers firing workers for failure to vaccinate. they would very much LIKE for employers to do so and are demanding a “green pass” as a prerequisite to work, but as anyone who has ever tried can tell you, actually firing a worker in many european countries is no easy task.

so they are doing THIS instead. “hey, just don’t pay them! failure to vaxx = unjustified absence.”

and this is spreading.

and hey, that last part, not creepy at all, right? just real time all the time tracking of you linked to an ID you need to go pretty much anywhere or work (and will likely soon need to renew frequently as in israel).

i’m sure governments won’t use it for anything creepy or untoward or expand the reach of this program to encompass more and more intrusive things. i mean when have they ever done THAT before?

this is like watching all of europe and most of the west not only forget the lessons of the 1930’s but invert them and mistake those travesties for a “how to” manual.

fascism is back. totalitarianism is back. and, like last time, both are seen as “the way forward” for “modern people” and a “collectivist technocratic solution to common problems.”

like last time, they are leftist youth movements led by cynical, manipulative elites seeking personal gain and pitching vapid slogans.

and like last time, they need to unify and motivate a reluctant people by scaring them with some external enemy.

and this time the pretext is “public health.”

your pesky rights get in the way of their plans, so it’s always a “public private partnership” where they get the private sector to do their really dirty work in exchange for free goodies and freedom from relentless attack.

and do not forget: the media LOVES this and will ALWAYS carry water for it.

how many times were hitler and mussolini and stalin time’s “man of the year”? 4? 5?

they were darlings of american media. we needed to be more like them.

and hey, remember when the NYT not only published a story that it was poland that had attacked germany, but won a pulitzer for it?

Marcelo P. Lima @MarceloPLima

This blew my mind: The New York Times printed Nazi propaganda that Poland had invaded Germany, and the journalist who wrote this won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts.

so, can you really be surprised now when these same media look to once more support these same authoritarian impositions?

if so, please tell me how. i’m honestly curious to hear about how a dying industry does not want the state to step in and validate/save it. and the bribes are already flowing:

public health is a great scare story (and watch as everything from climate to gun violence gets subsumed under this rubric), but when one looks at all of this, it starts to severely strain credulity to claim that all this creeping fascism and totalitarianism is “all about public health.”

what it really looks like is a nasty misalignment of incentives where the more they oppress us, the more power they get and those who collude with them and enable them get to ride along on the coat tails.

but, there is an easy test here to see what this is really about:

align incentives.

and alamaba has an interesting thought here:

Jacob Cabe @jacobcabe

BREAKING: New Alabama bill will give employees the right to take legal action against their employer if they are injured by the vaccine

if you want me to vaccinate as a condition of my work, then you bear the responsibility for the risks of vaccinating me.

this creates what is called “a market” and free markets are totalitarian kryptonite because free markets generate a deep need for information and price discovery and encourage accurate and complete evaluation of trade offs.

it’s really simple. if you face the benefits of your actions and not their costs, of course you’ll do stupid things.

you’ll happily inflict 20 pounds of disease to get an ounce of cure because it’s YOUR cure and the disease falls on someone else.

it’s the literal recipe for bad decision making and resource allocation.

and nearly all government works this way.

if your employer made you wear face paint made with lead and cadmium as a requirement of your work, you could sue the hell out of them (or of the face paint manufacturer)

and this is why this does not happen.

(and note that it’s not that evil employers would seek to harm you. that’s rarely true. but if they face no incentive to “get it right” or costs from “getting it wrong” then they don’t bother to understand the trade offs and tend to go with what looks easy or conventional.)

with the current vaccines structure, your employer gets free stuff, they get to force you, bear zero liability for a bad outcome, and neither does anyone else. there is no risk reward for them, just a goodie room.

this is not a sound basis for policy.

and you can see it all through the system. can literally anyone believe that pfizer and AZ and JnJ and moderna would have run trials this brief, this slipshod, made such aggressive claims that failed to hold up, and then vaccinated all the controls after 3 months if they faced the liability for getting it wrong and making claims about benefit and risk that wound up being untrue?

how can anyone trust a system with such a profound misalignment of incentives?

there is a BETTER WAY to handle that.

but this is really a sort of “if i had a clean sheet of paper” solution. it’s an aspiration and a guiding principle. it’s not going to help us right now.

but what alabama is proposing CAN.

if the feds want dragoon employers into their authoritarian apparatus, then let the states hold such minions accountable to we the people by allowing the people to sue these employers if their policies harm us.

then let’s see if they still want to play when they are exposed to the risk as well as reward of their choices.

(betcha they don’t)

power without accountability is a recipe for truly nasty tyranny.

so let’s stop granting it.

no sane human would try to raise a child or even a hamster that way.

what on earth would lead you to believe that you could, in such a fashion, create a government or a business structure and not have it turn on you?

it’s really very simple:

truly good ideas can be sold on their merits. it is only bad ideas that require coercion.

choose markets, not menace.

the society you save may be your own…