Just Let The Military Enforce The Vaccine?

Hey fam, welcome! This is season 1, episode 1. I am so excited to bring this to you. If you see stories you want me to cover, send them my way. Let’s get to work.

The military to enforce the vaccine?

This is literally the perfect story for the first edition of a newsletter about government overreach. Jim Cramer went on his show last night and said we need to go to war against COVID by universally enforcing the vaccine. How does Jim suggest we do this? With the military. Watch:

Lawrence Jones III @LawrenceBJones3

These people are insane.

Jim Cramer wants the military to be over the vaccine mandates AND says that you should be forced to “prove your contentious objector status in court” or go to jail. Does anyone have a pocket constitution that Jim can borrow? Stick with stocks, Jim.

No vaccine? No job in a hospital!

Almost any medical professional will tell you that hospitals are significantly understaffed following the pandemic. How does the government plan to help? By making things worse of course.

This is from The Wall Street Journal:

Some hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare providers are preparing to operate without up to a third of their staff at the start of next year, if those workers don’t comply with a federal mandate to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

The Biden administration is requiring facilities that receive funding from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to have workers vaccinated by Jan. 4.

The Biden administration is planning to take hospitals that are already understaffed and eliminate a third of their remaining staff in the name of saving lives? What about the lives that will be lost due to staffing shortages? If you or a family member are in need of lifesaving treatment, do you really care if a medical professional is vaccinated? Of course not.

You Can’t Sue The Government?

A SWAT team blew up an innocent woman’s house to catch a bad guy who barricaded himself in the house. So far, so good. The woman’s house was unlivable when the ordeal was complete so she requested the city repair the $50,000 worth of damage that was done by the SWAT team. The city declined and prevented her from suing.

This is from Reason:

"In its pursuit of the fugitive and pursuant to its police powers, Baker alleges the City caused significant economic damage—over $50,000—to her home. Then, the City refused to compensate her for the damage," writes Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. "Baker has alleged damage to her private property—and the City's refusal to compensate for such damage—that plausibly amounts to a Fifth Amendment violation."

The fact that this needed to be spelled out is a commentary on how difficult it has become to get meaningful accountability from the government. At the center of Baker's case is the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment, which is supposed to provide recourse to those who had their property taken or destroyed by the government. But this protection has been weakened by a series of court cases creating carveouts for actions taken under the broad scope of "police powers."

"They're forcing unlucky individuals to shoulder the burden of doing something that's good for society," Jeffrey Redfern, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, the public interest law firm representing Baker, told me in March. "Taking dangerous criminals off the street is good for society. If the city decides that it really needs to put a road through your house, that might be the right call. It might be something the community really needs. But that doesn't justify making one unlucky owner bear the cost of doing something that's good for everyone."

To be clear, don’t blame the SWAT officers. Their job is to stop bad guys and they did just that. The problem here is the city did everything they could to prevent an innocent woman from recuperating her losses. Thankfully, calmer heads prevailed when a federal court ruled that she can sue for damages.

Not bound by the first amendment?

Government overreach is a problem because it violates our constitutional rights. What about when a private company does it?

Jack Dorsey has decided to leave Twitter and is turning his kingdom over to Twitter’s chief technology officer, Parag Agrawal. Agrawal has been CTO since 2017 and knows the company inside and out. However, Agrawal has a deeply disturbing quote from last year that we need to discuss.

This is from our friends at Fox Business:

"Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation," Agrawal said in 2020 during an interview with Technology Review’s Editor-in-Chief Gideon Lichfield. "The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed." 

The concerning part of this quote is Agrawal’s claim regarding a “healthy public conversation.” The problem is who decides the definition of this? What if he decides that part of a “healthy public conversation” is to ban anyone from Twitter who is critical of vaccine mandates? Agrawal is essentially saying that he knows best and all of us peasants on Twitter are just along for the ride.

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