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Jacob Cabe
@jacobcabe
BREAKING: New Alabama bill will give employees the right to take legal action against their employer if they are injured by the vaccine
September 25th 2021

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if you want me to vaccinate as a condition of my work, then you bear the responsibility for the risks of vaccinating me.

this creates what is called “a market” and free markets are totalitarian kryptonite because free markets generate a deep need for information and price discovery and encourage accurate and complete evaluation of trade offs.

it’s really simple. if you face the benefits of your actions and not their costs, of course you’ll do stupid things.

you’ll happily inflict 20 pounds of disease to get an ounce of cure because it’s YOUR cure and the disease falls on someone else.

it’s the literal recipe for bad decision making and resource allocation.

and nearly all government works this way.

if your employer made you wear face paint made with lead and cadmium as a requirement of your work, you could sue the hell out of them (or of the face paint manufacturer)

and this is why this does not happen.

(and note that it’s not that evil employers would seek to harm you. that’s rarely true. but if they face no incentive to “get it right” or costs from “getting it wrong” then they don’t bother to understand the trade offs and tend to go with what looks easy or conventional.)

with the current vaccines structure, your employer gets free stuff, they get to force you, bear zero liability for a bad outcome, and neither does anyone else. there is no risk reward for them, just a goodie room.

this is not a sound basis for policy.

and you can see it all through the system. can literally anyone believe that pfizer and AZ and JnJ and moderna would have run trials this brief, this slipshod, made such aggressive claims that failed to hold up, and then vaccinated all the controls after 3 months if they faced the liability for getting it wrong and making claims about benefit and risk that wound up being untrue?

how can anyone trust a system with such a profound misalignment of incentives? ...

but this is really a sort of “if i had a clean sheet of paper” solution. it’s an aspiration and a guiding principle. it’s not going to help us right now.

but what alabama is proposing CAN.

if the feds want dragoon employers into their authoritarian apparatus, then let the states hold such minions accountable to we the people by allowing the people to sue these employers if their policies harm us.

then let’s see if they still want to play when they are exposed to the risk as well as reward of their choices.

(betcha they don’t)

power without accountability is a recipe for truly nasty tyranny.

so let’s stop granting it.

no sane human would try to raise a child or even a hamster that way.

what on earth would lead you to believe that you could, in such a fashion, create a government or a business structure and not have it turn on you?

it’s really very simple:

truly good ideas can be sold on their merits. it is only bad ideas that require coercion.

choose markets, not menace.

the society you save may be your own…