Normally in a free society we only force people to do things like this as an absolute last resort, and even then we should ideally only do it for the minimum amount of time and with the maximum amount of oversight. That's definitely not the case at the moment though.
In a free society there are a number of avenues we can exhaust before we even begin to think about going down the compulsion route. If we want another person to do something that they don't want to do we can:
- ask them - politely ideally :)
- try to persuade them, with appeals to emotion or reason
- give them incentives
- pay them outright
Those last two haven't even been mentioned as far as I'm aware so far. Whether it be in relation to masks or any of the other incursions into our daily liberties. Countries, even western countries, seem to be just jumping straight to compulsion.
Fortunately masks haven't became compulsory in the UK ..yet. If they do become required wearing though I'm thinking of using 'option 4' from the above list to challenge the idea. I need to work through my thinking though to make sure my argument is watertight. I don't want to go into battle on Twitter and leave myself wide open to attack :)
(What incredible art.
I think I might start selling these T-shirts)
I'm thinking it'll go a little like this.
Someone states masks should be compulsory. I then state that normally we exhaust the above options in a free society before we move to the force of law, then I ask;
"How much would you be prepared to pay me to wear a mask? Either directly yourself or through taxation."
I'm sure the initial reaction will be to dismiss the idea as ridiculous. I can then move on to state that if wearing masks in public is so effective then surely it's worth the money "..even if it just saves one life" - as they say. If they then state that it isn't worth the money I can then reply that it can't be that effective then, otherwise it would be deemed worth paying for. I can also then accuse them of weighing up the cost versus the risk - i.e. of putting a price on the "lives lost". Something they themselves constantly chastise other people for.
I'm also expecting the emotional type responses; "Why should YOU get paid to wear a mask?" or "Why are you being so selfish, wanting to profit from a crisis?". However, these are easy to knock back too. As I can just remind them that I personally don't think wearing a mask in public is beneficial. In fact, quite the opposite. So if they want me to do something that I don't want to do, nor believe is right, then the onus is on them to get me, and others like me, to acquiesce to their desires ..and that in a free society they should be doing that within the law. Not by trashing people's basic rights.
The one hole I can see so far is the problem with practically implementing such a system. They'd be entitled to say; "how would that even work? how would you make sure people were actually even wearing the mask?". So I'd need a nice easy system to make it practicable. A simple way would be if the government paid everyone 'x amount a week' for wearing a mask. Then anyone caught not wearing one in public would simply lose that pay. Anyone not wanting to wear a mask full stop could just not wear one and say "I don't care about the money".
The only minor problem here is that it would mean police and others checking the mask wearing would have to ask non-mask wearers for their details in order to cross them off the payment list so to speak. Which would be a minor civil infringement. However, it would at least be preferable to being stopped and fined or arrested for not wearing a mask under compulsion.
Such a payment system would obviously be a total waste of money (at least in my opinion), but that would be the point. If you think it has value then pay for it. If it doesn't have that much value then leave me alone and stop infringing my civil liberties.
Finally, there's also the added argument that the compulsory system costs money too. As with the example at the beginning, where it took a group of cops to deal with a single woman not wearing a mask. How much does it cost to enforce such a law, what with police, courts and paperwork, etc? Even if it's a small percentage of people refusing. So paying people to do it instead of forcing people would not be so different even in that regard. In fact, it would be interesting to see just how much you would need to pay people to get the number of people wearing one up to say 95% of the population. Or whatever number was desired.
I'm not going to say what my price is :)
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