YOUR FIST ON MY NOSE

            For libertarians like me, the “your freedom ends when your fist hits my nose” is the litmus test for liberty.  It seems simple enough when spoken initially, but it gets complicated in practice.

            Here’s an example.  My conventional farming neighbors believe, with great conviction I might add, that my failure to vaccinate and medicate my cows and chickens poses a threat to their flocks and herds.  How so? 

            Failure to maintain health in my animals means mine are susceptible to sickness, which will be transmitted to surrounding animals and these farmers will lose their livelihoods and even their family legacy due to my negligence.  My fist has just hit their nose due to my failure to comply with orthodox pharmaceutical notions of wellness.

            It’s identical to the thinking that caused maskers and vaxxers to scream “murderer!” at those of us who took a different view.  To them, my fist was directly hitting their nose.  To me, their vax shedding and failure to give me their breath droplets weakened and compromised my immune system and therefore amounted to their fist hitting my nose.  But I didn’t scream “murderer!” at them.

            These are thorny issues and I wish I had a neat way to resolve them.  Think about the early protestant leaders in Switzerland who rounded up the anabaptists (founders of today’s Amish and Mennonite communities) to kill them because these contrarians didn’t believe infant baptism insured a home in heaven.  To these protestants, such deviant parenthood denied  children eternal life and therefore merited intervention to save the children from burning in hell.  Using the power of the state to enforce their notion of eternity, these protestants chased the anabaptists across Europe until America’s religious liberty landed them in a safe haven.  And here they have thrived.

            As I look down through history at these controversies, I’m struck by the common denominator of tyranny through government intervention as the thing that exacerbates the tension and violence.  In other words, if my neighbor thinks my unvaccinated cows threaten his herd, we can live with our differences in relative peace unless and until he gets his buddies to go to the general assembly and make a law demanding that every cow must get vaccinated.

            At that point, our differences elevate to violence because he can bring law enforcement guns to my gate and force me to comply.  It’s the government taking sides in an issue that elevates it to a new level of hysteria.

            In health choice, for example, I can take herbs and you can take Pfizer and we can live and let live.  But when government controls health care and requires Pfizer over herbs, we have violence.  The government’s involvement moves choice to coercion and agreeing to disagree to a point of violence.  Without coercion, people tend to figure out how to get along.

            Certainly non-official government coercion occurs, from individual vengeance to ad-hoc group violence.  But those are fairly rare.  The government is the arbiter of “your fist hitting my nose” and therefore it must draw the lines extremely loosely to avoid tyranny of the minority, or contrarian view.  Which leads to my point:  the level of societal harmony is in direct proportion to the level of government intervention.  Less intervention, more harmony.  More intervention, less harmony.  It follows as surely as the day the night.

            This discussions stems from a lengthy conversation I had two days ago with a physician, same age as I am, regarding how nasty things have become.  When we were kids, we knew people with different views but we got along, attended church together, were in civic clubs together, and found lots of commonality.  Today, disagreements escalate to threats and yelling.  Why?  I think it’s the fact that all these issues were personal choice issues back then and now the government has taken sides and decided to intervene in health, education, banking, energy, environment, housing, workplaces, financial options and a host of issues the government took no position on half a century ago.

            If you could withdraw the government from one arena in life, what would it be?