See also: The Vaccine Passport Pathway to a Social Credit System

As time goes on, we are learning more and more about Covid 19 and the Covid 19 vaccines.  To date, the most important and surprising information about the vaccines is that they do not prevent the vaccinated from contracting or transmitting the virus.  The irony is that the CDC, a government agency, readily admits this[i] but other sectors of the government are carrying on as if this vitally important new information did not exist at all. 

Take for example Biden's OSHA which, before it was temporarily halted by a Circuit Court ruling, ordered the unvaccinated but not the vaccinated employees of private companies to undergo inconvenient weekly Covid tests even though other parts of the government were admitting that the vaccinated transmit the virus as readily as the unvaccinated.  The whole moral justification of forcing people to take the vaccine is to protect others even if the "hesitant" don't want to risk taking the jab due to the escalating problem of vaccine-related deaths and serious injuries.[ii] But we now know that the vaccine is a dud.  While it can reduce symptoms of Covid, it cannot prevent the vaccinated from catching and transmitting Covid.  And yet the government is acting as if none of these matters and is continuing to push harsh mandates upon those who do not want to play vaccine roulette and take the risk of a vaccine injury.

Again as time goes on, it is becoming increasingly evident that the reason why the  Biden administration is demonstrably not "following the science"[iii] is that the irrational and probably unconstitutional vaccine mandates are not about public health at all but more likely about the implementation of a universal digital identification program that governments are labeling "vaccine passports."

To understand why the government seems determined to tag every citizen of every age with a digital ID, it is first necessary to understand the attitudinal evolution of political elites in Western countries.  These elites appear to be losing their faith in the classical liberal emphasis on individual human freedom that was intellectually nurtured in the West by such thinkers as Kant, Voltaire, Locke, Bastiat, Mill, and Spencer and attained its clearest concrete political expression in the American Constitutional Republic.  The essence of this revolution in political thought and practice is that it gave common people protection against the potential abuse of power of their ruling elites.  Such protections included political theory that rooted individual rights in natural law and Divine Will as well as practical institutions such as the division of power between the states and central government, the further division of those powers between the legislature, executive, and judiciary, the rule of law, courts of law, the Bill of Rights, privacy rights, property rights, elections and so forth. 

Despite considerable differences, Western elites used to broadly agree on the moral necessity of protecting the people against the potential abuse of power of those who controlled a society's instruments of coercion such as the police and military.  This appears to be no longer case.  Western elites from the political, commercial, and media worlds regularly meet in events and "training schools"[iv] sponsored by the World Economic Forum  (WEF) to discuss the need for a whole new kind of society where people own no personal property, have little or no personal privacy, are heavily dependent upon their governments for the goods and services they consume, the location of their homes and where and how often they can travel.  All this illiberalism is couched in terms of a new kind of "sustainable," "inclusive," "equitable" quasi-utopian society[v] not unlike the vaporous visions that Marx used to conjure up in his early writings.

The reason for this abandonment of traditional Western ideals appears to be their belief that these ideals no longer work in the post-World War II era.  At the beginning of that era, Western elites were still largely committed to civil liberties but their commitment to economic liberty and constrained government was considerably less than that of earlier generations of leaders. Then increasingly post-World War II elites began to strive to seek and sustain their power by claiming they could proactively provide their voters with a level of economic wealth, economic security, and an overall social "safety" environment never before seen in human history.  The economic justification for these escalating promises was a form of neo- Keynesianism.  The economist John Maynard Keynes did not trust the markets to correct themselves during recurring business cycles and so advocated that government go into debt to "stimulate" stagnant economies out of recessions and then pay off that debt during the subsequent booms and budgetary surpluses brought about by the proactive economic managers.  Western politicians quickly forgot about the "paying off" part and gradually over the postwar decades increased the public debt to the stupendous levels we see today.  Western central banks also suppressed interest rates thereby incentivizing private companies and consumers to heap unprecedented private debt onto the unprecedented public debt. 

Today the European and Japanese bond markets are in such shambles that only their central banks will purchase their government debt.  And as economists have been pointing out for years, governments cannot possibly pay for all the promises they have made to their voters for future benefits such as pensions, medical care, and other cradle-to-grave comforts.  The American federal government alone has, by some measures, a 200 Trillion gap between future expected revenues and future promised benefits.[vi]   Little wonder that today's Western elites are giving up on traditional Western liberties because they know that once the hard times hit, the masses will use those liberties such as freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to protest, the courts, and elections as weapons to lash back at the "establishments" in power. 

The establishments, of course, do not want to give up their wealth, status, and power, and so must find some way of depriving the masses of these dangerous liberties, exert more authority over them and turn them from free citizens into subjects.

Photo credit: Governor Tom Wolf, CC BY 2.0 license.

Jeffrey Barrett is an economist, writer and business owner.  He can be reached at usacomments@yahoo.com