Tyrannizing the Common Good
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/...he-common-good/
September 13, 2021|
C.C. Pecknold

President Biden has lost patience. After months of telling Americans that vaccine mandates aren’t necessary, Biden announced on Thursday a federal vaccination mandate affecting 100 million Americans. Not only did he not bother to provide citizens with a coherent rationale, but the rationale he did provide seemed to suggest that the mandate was necessary because vaccinated people need to be protected from unvaccinated people—a rational that implies that the vaccine being mandated doesn’t work! Biden’s patience has worn too thin.

Rather than make a clear case for the necessity of a mandate with his legitimate executive power, constrained by law, Biden has chosen to utilize ideologically aligned corporate power and OSHA safety regulations as political “work-arounds” to achieve by executive dictat that which had proved too difficult: to demonstrate that the mandate is reasonable, legal, and necessary. As with his remarks this summer on his novel use of the CDC to place a moratorium on evictions—“maybe it’s illegal, but it’s worth it”—the key to Mr. Biden’s political strategy seems to be rooted neither in reason nor justice, but in the sheer will to power in the name of “the common good,” immediately revealing how the very notion of the common good can be abused.

Some red-state attorneys general have announced that they intend to use their own powers to resist federal overreach. Are they then against the common good? Partisans will answer that question differently. At just the moment that the federal government has chosen to sue Texas over abortion restrictions, a massive set of lawsuits, from individuals to companies and states, are about to be filed against the federal government. Does that sound like the mandate is serving the flourishing of all? Biden’s inaugural promise of “unity” seems even less credible now than when he uttered it in January. But the awful political effects—to say nothing of the enormous distrust which has arisen around health policy—reveals a much greater threat than Covid-19.

Hidden in plain sight is a problem with our very notion of the common good, and relatedly, our way of adjudicating what counts as reasonable and necessary for the end of the common good. We have liberals who now want to use a stick rather than a carrot to achieve a desired outcome. They propose dramatic, punitive measures in such a ways as to cause people to see the common good as nothing but a cudgel, a political weapon wielded by those who have power. As a result, we see a certain skepticism arise, especially in the libertarian-inclination to refuse not only every mandate, but the idea of a common good altogether. But both the liberal and libertarian are united in a common error which is sending us into a death-spiral.-- excerpt, rest at link above --