No Gasoline Without 'COVID Papers' Is Already Happening Some Places

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/no-gasoline-withoutcovid-papersis-already-happening-some-places/

has perhaps received the most attention, such tactics continue to be adopted by other countries around the world. On Monday, the New York Times reported, Austria “began a targeted lockdown against unvaccinated people, confining adults and minors ages 12 and older to their homes.”

Around the world governments, for the first time in modern history, are violating the civil liberties of perfectly healthy individuals to combat a respiratory virus. That these policies are being carried out for the supposed good of those they oppress hardly matters.

“Many of the most monstrous deeds in human history have been perpetrated in the name of doing good—in pursuit of some ‘noble’ goal,” FEE founder Leonard Read once observed. “They illustrate the fallacy that the end justifies the means.”

The carnage of the 20th century—the bloodiest century in human history—shows us what happens when central planners try to use state coercion to advance a collective good. The soft tyranny of modern government, much like the horrors of modern socialism, brings to mind a dark quote from C.S. Lewis on the tyranny humanity should most fear.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” Lewis once observed. “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”