About six months ago, I wrote an article here explaining that state preemptions of local government are a bad thing—even when Ron DeSantis does it. I vehemently stand by these principles. However, it is now time for Ron DeSantis to take that principle of decentralized control and run with it—against the Biden administration. Just as it is acceptable to see local governments passing laws in defiance of their state, it is now time for the states to pass laws in defiance of the federal government. This is because on September 9, 2021, President Joe Biden announced that all employers with one hundred–plus employees will be required to mandate vaccines or weekly negative Covid tests.
Never in my lifetime has something occurred that was so egregiously opposed to Misesian concepts of liberalism and freedom. In fact, this is directly in line with perhaps the most opposite ideology to liberalism: fascism. Benito Mussolini said himself that “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” In today’s political discourse, people abuse the word fascism and sometimes even cite this definition of corporatism while stretching it somewhat from the truth. However, the state requiring that businesses require the vaccine from one of three large corporations that were propped up by the state is undoubtedly the merger of state and corporate power that Mussolini dreamed of.
In my earlier-mentioned piece criticizing DeSantis’s intervention remitting fines passed by local governments in regard to local covid regulations, I had two main issues with the order. First, was a preference for localism, citing the president of the Mises Institute, Jeff Deist, who claimed that “Insisting on universal political arrangements is a huge tactical mistake for libertarians.” This concern is even more true as it relates to Biden’s newest announcement, as this is simply another universal political arrangement, now expanding to the national level. My other concern was that the a sweeping universal political arrangement like this—even in the best-case scenario, when the decision is hypothetically good for everyone with no cost—sets a precedent that the central state now has authority over that issue.