Essential service workers are the service animals and the politicians are the disabled.
Intelligent disobedience may be required to prevent the politicians from walking us all off the edge of a cliff. They're clearly far too busy yelling into their respective echo chambers to see the cliff coming.
Almost everybody believes a sizable part of the population to be brainwashed, they disagree on what part it is however.
And I do very much believe that it is a discussion worth having for society at large. Do we believe that we are generally aware of the dangers of things we do? Is outlawing oversized sodas the right thing to do? Would it be okay to allow them only if you can use a code word that signals that you do, in fact, understand the risk? Do we not like that approach at all, or do we just not want to deal with deciding who understands the risk and is able to walk down the stairs and who isn't?
Having said that, the freedom to fail should only apply to individuals. Corporate or government entities should never be treated as humans and be allowed to fail the hard way. First, because the magnitude of consequences are incomparable, and second, because the strings of corporate responsibilities are entangled in such a way so as to lead nowhere. They can always lose a head and grow another one.
As to crossing of one's individual freedom into another's, that's what the service men are for. But it was alright while they operated under presumption of innocence. Now they are clearly trying to render people guilty until proven otherwise. That was one of the points in my first reply.
I'm still in the camp of "let them", but it's a mixture of "it's hard to figure out who really knows the risks", "I don't want to live in a world that's optimized for perfect safety and takes away all freedom to achieve it" and "we want people to take risks, even giant risks, even when they clearly have no idea how large the risk is, because we'll advance much quicker because of it, we just don't want all people to take those risks at the same time".
Shouldn't welfare and free will go directly against it each other?
If someone crashes and burns, society has to pay for it through taxes where all members of the society suffer because one of them has crashed and burned.
Meanwhile, if you remove this person's agency to crash and burn, you've saved society from scarifice but you removed that person's free will.