And he’s Texas state Rep Jonathan Stickland. He’s attempting to bawl out epidemiologist Peter Hotez of Baylor, a developer of vaccines for neglected diseases, and looking like a guy who bought the “everything is private sector” bullshit from the libertarians, hook, line, and sinker:
Make the case for your sorcery to consumers on your own dime. Like every other business. Quit using the heavy hand of government to make your business profitable through mandates and immunity. It’s disgusting.
— Jonathan Stickland (@RepStickland) May 7, 2019
Not every man, woman, and child is an island; in fact, we’re closely interconnected via, of all things, our atmosphere, through which pathogens often travel, and that is not subject to the free market. If we desire public health, it’s not a matter of individual choice, with little or not impact on everyone else. It’s not like buying a hat. If you fail to buy this hat, then you may doom that new-born infant, or that neighbor who, for medical reasons, cannot take the vaccine, to an early and awful death.
As I noted earlier, this is symptomatic of a deeply flawed view of how societies should work. Not everything is subject to the whims of the free market, not if we’re to have a stable and prosperous society – and that’s the real point, isn’t it? The role of public health – not just vaccines, but publicly available pathogen-free water, and other aspects of which I’m too sleepy to remember – in reaching the goal of a stable, happy, and prosperous society cannot be subject to the whims, paranoia, and flawed reasoning of the public, or it will fail in its role, and then we all pay for that failure, through death and misery. Or, if you really prefer financial measures, lower productivity.
I suspect that a truly effective return volley to Stickland’s view is contained in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, or allied work. I must find the time to buy and read it someday.
But I do appreciate the use of the word sorcery. So rarely do you hear it in public discourse these days. Makes one long for the days of the Salem Witch Trials, doesn’t it?
