All government exists only with the consent of the governed.
That’s always true. You might need to back that up with your life, but it remains true. There are never enough cops to force the issue otherwise and further, not all cops will agree with an order either.
Some local officials don’t agree with the tiered strategy, though. They plan to use their power to proceed with their own reopening plans, despite the fact that Pennsylvania confirmed 1,323 new coronavirus cases in a single day on Friday.
Lebanon County officials and some Republican lawmakers, including state Sen. Dave Arnold and Reps. Russ Diamond, Frank Ryan and Sue Helm, delivered a letter Friday to the Democratic governor informing him of their plans.
“Lebanon County has met the requirement of your original Stay-at-Home Order, which was to flatten the curve of the COVID-19 outbreak and allow hospitals the time to gear up for COVID-19 patients being admitted to the ICU and in need of ventilators,” the letter reads.
The original argument for all of these orders was to prevent overwhelming the health care system. That’s a contract, and the people have the absolute right to drag any official who moves the goalposts after obtaining agreement out of office by their hair if necessary, or simply to ignore said order as a violation of that agreement and be willing to enforce that refusal by whatever means are necessary.
Governments have fairly-broad public health powers. But those powers have never extended, because they can’t, to imprisoning — which is what a quarantine is for a person who isn’t sick — when applied to people who aren’t ill. The government bears the burden of proof in every instance when it wishes to restrict your freedom. There are no exceptions, ever, to this fact.
It’s time to stop the bull****; the Constitution is not the “10 Suggestions.” State and local governments also obtain their power only by mutual consent of essentially all of the population. If even a single-digit percentage of the population disagrees that government is toast should those people decide that they really mean it.
This bull**** show has laid bare the real purpose of all manner of “licensing”; it is not to protect the public at all but rather a cudgel that can be applied when an unrealted insult is perceived by the government. Threatening to yank a liquor license for something having nothing to do with the laws surrounding the legal age of consumption of alcohol is proof positive that such “licenses” lack any sort of actual merit upon which they were based and issued in the first instance.
Think this doesn’t apply to driving too? The hell it doesn’t.
It is time to stop pretending folks; that which made America unique is gone, and it up to us, as a body politic, to decide whether we insist that it both return immediately and that those who choose to try to obstruct that will face just punishment, irrespective of whether they agree with said punishment or not (of course they won’t initially — duh!)
There is much hardship coming. The actions of Congress, the President and Federal Reserve over the last couple of months with regard to monetary and fiscal policy guarantee that. There is no easy way out of what they’ve put in motion; all choices are hard, but some are a lot harder than others, and the longer we sit back and think it will be all ok the worse its going to get.
It is time to choose, in short, before the choices are forced upon you by others who claim to be your “betters.”