My position is indeed speculative, however it’s not without evidence. We very rarely regain rights or freedoms when they are taken so I think it’s valid to be concerned about the same thing happening here.
Emphasis on the last year and half, too.
Please give examples
Granted, ~20 years is a pretty good run.
Trade & tariff conflicts of the 1930s, which spiraled from a smaller economic conflict into a larger economic conflict and into the great depression. All because the government was given too much leash to run with.
Letting the government (and Fed) bail out Wall Street repeatedly and institutionalize too big to fail as an economic policy.
The US Government specializes in lubricating slopes and speeding down them.
At some point, you just have to look down and notice that the slope of the ground is negative, and everything is greasy.
Other people have covered that in many comments throughout this thread. I personally don't want to live in a world where I am asked to show my papers -- whatever those papers may be -- to participate in daily life.
> Do you think unvaccinated people should be allowed to travel internationally?
I think so, but it's certainly within the rights of any nation to choose the rules by which foreigners may enter their country. I care less about this than I do about having to show a "passport" to get food.
> Isn’t that really dangerous?
In a highly vaccinated population? No. That's the point of vaccines. Once the threat of (involuntary) serious and illness and death has been abrogated, SARS-CoV2 takes its place amongst the pantheon of other respiratory viruses that we have lived with for centuries.
Has that participation ever involved travel to another country? Standard passports exist for very good reasons... otherwise, there wouldn't be 100% of nations who depend on them (are there even any nations that don't ask for one?)
And most western countries are still far to far from being highly vaccinated. If they were, we wouldn't need to ask for their vaccination status.
Yes, long term we either manage to actually erradicate SARS-Cov-2 or at least reduce it to the group of all the other dangerous viruses we can deal with. If the vaccination rate is high enough. Think measels. They didn't ever go away, but for many years, they were not a problem. They are back due to too many people who think they can skip the vaccinations.
And if you ever tried to go onto international, especially intercontinental travel, many countries require proof of vaccination against a variety of diseases.
We're not talking about "most western countries"...we're talking about New York City, where 72% of the adult population has had at least one dose, and about 0.2% get another dose, every day:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.p...
It's all on the same page I linked.
I don't want to be around people who can make me sick. If I go to a restaurant and I'm vaccinated, and everyone else is as well, it's very unlikely I will make others sick or that they'll make me sick. If you go, you may make vaccinated or unvaccinated people sick, and they may make you sick.
You're the one that's intruding on other people's freedoms here.
Well, first...I'm not sure why you think I support those other things? If your argument is that I'm a hypocrite, you might be disappointed to find out that I'm not. If your argument is that because we do those other things, we should do this thing...well, my goodness. That is a slippery slope, isn't it?
But perhaps more importantly, there's an obvious, bright-line difference between drinking alcohol in a bar or flying on a plane, and having to show papers to do 99% of the things I do on a daily basis.
At this point, there is no power conceivable that the Federal government could not claim under the umbrella of "it might affect commerce somewhere".
Most of the powers the Federal government has seized from the states have been rationalized under the ICC. Like making it illegal for a farmer to grow wheat on his own farm to feed his own animals. [1]
> The Court decided that Filburn's wheat-growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for animal feed on the open market, which is traded nationally, is thus interstate, and is therefore within the scope of the Commerce Clause. Although Filburn's relatively small amount of production of more wheat than he was allotted would not affect interstate commerce itself, the cumulative actions of thousands of other farmers like Filburn would become substantial. Therefore the Court decided that the federal government could regulate Filburn's production.
The doctors who gained, then lost, police powers to enforce quarantine during the "Spanish Flu" would like to have a word