Sacrificing ‘essential liberty to gain a little temporary safety’ is the death of freedom

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July 28, 2021 (American Thinker) – As purportedly “free” countries all over the world get their tyrannical freak on by insisting that every citizen be jabbed with an experimental pharmaceutical cocktail or face the wrath of the Leviathan, I am reminded of a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, in which he remarked: “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive.”  

Jefferson’s point was that ordinary citizens represent a necessary check on the natural abuses of government and the last line of defense against corruption and political tyranny.

Make no mistake: the writer of the Declaration of Independence saw government not as a benefactor of man’s freedom, but rather its adversary. “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground,” Jefferson warned in another letter to Edward Carrington, a distinguished soldier and Virginia statesman. Free people don’t stay free by blindly trusting everything government officials say and do; free people stay free by treating government with great apprehension and even greater suspicion. 

That’s exactly what we’re finally seeing play out in England, Ireland, France, Italy, Australia, and everywhere else ordinary citizens have taken to the streets to protest their governments’ handling of the China Virus — a contagion that looks less and less like some microscopic pathogen and more and more like a “Great Reset” bug spreading communist China’s totalitarianism far and wide. In nations that ironically define themselves in contrast to closed, communist societies, Western governments have given themselves the powers to lock people up in their homes at whim, dictate who may pray and when, demand that citizens submit to experimental medical treatments, and punish aggressively anyone who dares question what authorities have branded as truth. 

There is no free speech when only the government’s speech is allowed. There is no self-government when government rules by decree. There is no constitution to protect fundamental human rights when governments are allowed to execute super-secret, invisible-ink emergency provisions of their charters that magically nullify constitutional protections until the “Build Back Better” boobs give the all-clear. There is nothing democratic about 1% of the population dictating how the other 99% shall live.

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s new prime minister, released a statement last week about mandatory vaccinations that drove this new reality home. “I respect different views,” he claimed, before insisting that “there is a time and a place in which this discussion needs to stop — and it is our very lives.” Personal liberty should be defended, you see, until it must be smothered for the sake of safety.  

“The science is unequivocal: The vaccines work,” he declared. Yet somehow vaccinated Israelis are still in danger from those who refuse a jab, a somewhat more equivocal expression of vaccine effectiveness. If these experimental treatments work so well, then those who take them should have nothing to fear from those who refuse. If they do not, then the prime minister and leaders around the world are lying when they declare, “The vaccines work.”  

Either science is being ignored or it is being politicized. Yet the same governments that spent over a year covering up the China Virus’s origins by screaming, “Trust the science,” are the same ones screaming for their citizens to duly comply with mandatory vaccinations in the name of science today.  

Should we want people to be alive and healthy? Of course. But giving up “essential liberty to gain a little temporary safety,” as Benjamin Franklin famously observed, is a recipe for winding up with neither. Anybody who doubted that wisdom eighteen months ago should have a much keener understanding of it now. If governments are allowed to veto liberty at their discretion in the name of public health, we will be inundated with public health crises birthed from the fiendish imaginations of unscrupulous bureaucrats from here to eternity, and human liberty will die.

Does anyone believe we’re not heading toward future national lockdowns in vain attempts to quell “climate change” or “racial injustice” or “wealth inequality” health crises, too? The world has been under attack from a Chinese Virus, and the world’s governments responded by locking up their citizens and expanding their powers permanently. That’s a little like having the government defend you from gunfire by first shooting you in the foot; one way or another, you’re hobbling away.   

It’s just a little prick. Let the government stick you with its needle. What about the next needle, though, or the next one after that? If you are willing to hand to faceless bureaucrats the power to jab you today, do you consent to being jabbed whenever the government says it knows best? Because if there is anything about which governments are certain, it is that they always “know best.”

Can there be anything more intrusive than Big Jabber taking complete control over a person’s health? If not, then why shouldn’t government also intervene in everything else that fills up a person’s life? Why shouldn’t state agents who “know best” also decide where each citizen is allowed to live, what he is allowed to own, whom he is allowed to see, and what he is allowed to think?  

Ceding to government the authority to decide what goes into our bodies surely cedes to government the authority to determine everything else we do with those bodies, too. Then the question remaining is this: if killing freedom is the cost of survival, aren’t we just fighting one China Virus by unleashing another?

Hat tip to G. Abnego.

Reprinted with permission from American Thinker