Self-Interest Conquers Disease. Mellows Harshed.

Or: They Won't Admit It, but Some Leftists Hate Private Vaccination Requirements

Image by Mark Adriane, via Unsplash, license.

Not long after I made a similar point, but in what I hope was a somewhat more constructive and positive way despite my exasperation, Hayes Brown of MSNBC chimes in to the effect that it's good business to require employees to be vaccinated.

(Brown does, alas, call these requirements "mandates," further entrenching the apparently near-universal confusion between business and government in our society.)

This leftist columnist should be cheering the move, but he can't help sneering the whole way through, and spitting on the "laissez-faire" -- as if, and if only! -- wagon delivering the good news that we're about to get this pandemic right where we want it:

Hopefully, those same people are glad to learn that their laissez-faire [sic] approach to epidemiology is working. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tweeted Friday that the federal government won't be ordering people to get vaccinated any time soon. Instead, in the absence of government regulation and bureaucratic diktats, American corporations are stepping in. And the free market has spoken clearly: Vaccination mandates [sic] are good.

Those people. Aren't "othering" in general and phrases like those people supposed to be anathema to the left? More to the point, a small remnant of capitalism is showing us the way out of the pandemic: While it might be appropriate to call out many conservatives for being hypocrites about this, the charge of hypocrisy carries with it a subtext of moral agreement when one is not careful.

In that respect, Brown is careful: Leftists can be chaste to the point of unintelligibility when it comes to language, except when they disagree with someone, and then it's no holds barred. So, Brown is calling out hypocrisy, but we still know where his moral compass points, as we shall see.

However, he is like a meticulous navigator steering straight towards a dangerous rock because he is looking at a bad map, but ignoring what he could see through the window next to him.

Strike that: He just saw it. This move is a glaring refutation of the idea that "we" require the government to order us around, for our own good. That, left to our own devices, we'd all just get sick and die -- or worse.

Brown oddly and incorrectly accuses the right of advocating laissez-faire, but doing so hypocritically. (The right should advocate capitalism, but generally doesn't, and usually isn't convincing when it does.)

I'll pass over a tortured analysis of who's hypocritical about what, because here's what I find most interesting about Brown's piece:

All in all, I'm not seeing a downside for these corporate mandates. If anything, this is different from the "woke capitalism" Republicans were briefly yelling about. Rather than wanting to appear like they care about Black or LGBTQ rights [sic], major companies are even more cynically protecting their bottom lines. If that requires that their laborers be protected against disease so they can keep showing up and selling their time and bodies for profit, so be it. [bold added]

Here are apt expressions, although Brown is too pissed off to realize it, of the empty evil of altruism, society's dominant moral code, and collectivism, its political expression. It would appear, despite his claim to not see a "downside," that the government's not coercing everyone to get a vaccine is a downside to Brown, who professes to want vaccinations to happen.

But this defeat pales in comparison to the glimpse of the effectiveness of capitalism and self-interest Brown got and is trying his damnedest to bury: Those greedy corporations making it happen by the marriage of their self interest (called cynical and insinuated as corrupt by the phrase bottom line) and those of their individual workers -- who want to trade with them and freely do so (smeared by a cheap and cowardly analogy to prostitution) -- is proof that self-interest and the system he obviously hates are, in fact, moral and practical.

There is no joy in Mudville: What people like Brown have been claiming to want -- while supporting numerous tyrannical abuses of government -- is starting to happen thanks to the tiniest slivers of the system, capitalism, that have somehow survived in the weeds of our mixed economy, and despite the boots of the pandemic-emboldened thugs people like him support.

Brown is right to point out that the conservatives he calls out should be happy, but they're not the only ones. If they should recognize and celebrate business finding a way to get America closer to herd immunity (as a happy byproduct of trying to earn a living!), Brown should ask himself: If I am so concerned about the welfare of others, why am I unhappy to learn that capitalism and self-interest can deliver exactly those things?

The lack of joy and the dripping bitterness are telling enough. Will anyone notice, or will Brown and his ilk succeed in causing Americans to forget this miracle, and continue, themselves, hiding behind the scoundrel's refuge of a professed concern for others?

-- CAV