Why Is Agency Important for the Maintenance of Freedom?

            The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns agency, the freedom to choose how we will live our lives. The different types of government are on a spectrum with tyranny on one end and anarchy on the other end. The best kind of government is about mid-way between the two extremes because it is in the middle that citizens can best use their agency.

A tyrannical government is one that is cruel and oppressive. A tyrant or dictator has absolute power over his/her subjects. Such governments seek to have total control over their subjects. Some well-known tyrants are: 

·        Caligula (Roman Emperor, 37-41 A.D.)

·        Genghis Khan (Mongol ruler, 1206-1227 A.D.)

·        Henry VIII (King of England, 1509-1547 A.D.)

·        Ivan IV (Russian Tsar, 1533-1584 A.D.)

·        Maximilien Robespierre (de facto ruler of France, 1793-1794 A.D.)

·        Joseph Stalin (General Secretary of the Soviet Union, 1922-1953 A.D.)

·        Adolf Hitler (Chancellor of Germany, 1933-1945 A.D.)

·        Augusto Pinochet (President of Chile, 1973-1990 A.D.)

·        Pol Pot (Ruler of Democratic Kampuchea, now Cambodia, 1975-1979)

·        Kim Jong Il (Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, 1991-present)

The opposite of tyranny is anarchy. An anarchism is a society or group of people that rejects any type of hierarchy. Anarchy means to operated without any political institutions or hierarchical government. There is no authority or governing body, and self-government is encouraged and promoted. Synonyms are lawlessness, mobocracy, and revolution. A current example of anarchy is the “summer of love” where Black Lives Matter (BLM) burned, looted, and murdered in many cities in the United States and elsewhere.

According to W. Cleon Skousen in his book titled The Five Thousand Year Leap – 28 Great Ideas That Changed the World (pp. 22-24), the Founders struggled and worked diligently to put the American government – the American eagle – “firmly planted in the balanced center of the political spectrum. He quoted James Madison who described how the Founders created a government where there was a division of labor between federal government and the states:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite… The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State. (The Federalist Papers, No. 45, pp. 292-293.) (Emphasis mine.)

            Skousen explained that the Founders were determined to put the American eagle in the center of the spectrum between tyranny and anarchy. “The idea was to keep the power base close to the people. The emphasis was on strong local self-government.” The Founders gave certain powers and responsibilities to the federal government, and retained all other powers and responsibilities to the States or to the people themselves.

Skousen illustrated where the power is under three different types of government: A tyrant operates under the “Ruler’s Law” with 100% of the power, and an anarchy operated under “No Law” with 0% of the power. The ideal government operates under “People’s Law” with part of the power and authority vested in the federal government and the rest of the power and authority vested in the States or We the People.

President Joe Biden, or the people pulling his puppet strings, are seeking to turn the United States into a tyranny with 100% of the power and authority vested in the federal government. A recent example is the announcement that he made today at the White House mandating vaccinations.

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us,” he said, all but biting off his words. The unvaccinated minority “can cause a lot of damage, and they are.”

The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.

Biden is also signing an executive order to require vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government – with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.

            The issue of vax or no vax may be the cause that pushes freedom-loving Americans over the edge. However, it is complicated. I believe in vaccinations to stop terrible diseases. I am vaccinated, my husband is vaccinated, all six of our children and their spouses are vaccinated, and all our grandchildren twelve years old and older are vaccinated. You can see that my family and I are squarely in the vaccination camp.

Nevertheless, I am opposed to mandates for vaccinations. This is America, and our Constitution guarantees our freedom to choose. I believe that people should be vaccinated, but I am against forcing people to get the vaccination. Pro-choice advocates have been crying “my body, my choice” for fifty years, but many of them want to force non-vaxers to be vaccinated. Obviously, they believe in “my body, my choice” only when it comes to abortion.

I believe that the federal government is wrong in their approach. They should be showing that the vaccinations are good. I am hearing that 90-99 percent of the people hospitalized with the Delta variant have not been vaccinated. If these figures are true, why are they not front and center in all communications about COVID-19 instead of attacking non-vaxers?

Force does not work when dealing with freedom-loving people, but persuasion can be powerful. The first thing that the government should do is to put out the truth about the virus and the effectiveness of the vaccinations. This should be done openly and honestly – and not with social media banning other information.

At any rate, freedom to use agency to make our own choices is being challenged. I am vaccinated, and I choose to wear masks. I now wear N95 masks because I want to do all that I can do to stay healthy. With my health problems and those of my husband, COVID-19 could be bad news for either or both of us. So, we choose to be careful despite our hatred for masks. However, we still believe that people have the freedom to choose to be vaccinated or to take their chances with health and life. This is still America, the land of the free!