Does it really have to be more complicated than that?
(edited for clarity)
It is, because by choosing not to vaccinate, you compromise herd immunity and put others at risk. An unvaccinated child in a school would impact the right of a kid with leukemia to go to school, for example.
Are we going to force people to make the same decision as you or not? If you don't want to to that, then you're actually agreeing with me.
When it comes to vaccinating children who are medically sound to be vaccinated? Yes. Without hesitation, yes.
That's the difference between taking a vaccine and paying your taxes or buying car insurance.
You don't get to drive 100 mph on the highway because it entails risks to other people. Same situation here.
That's why "life, liberty, and happiness" is in the order that it is. Life before liberty before happiness.
Understand that some people can not get the vaccine. They are protected if everyone who can get the vaccine gets it. Now that a bunch of healthy people are note getting the vaccines, the ones that can not get it are at serious risk of not only illness, but death.
The vast majority of society has decided that your freedom is not worth the risk to other people. There was a minor exception for religion, and few people used it so it didn't really impact public health until very recently. Now a lot of people are abusing that provision, it is having a public health impact, and that provision and your freedom of choice on the matter need to be eliminated.
Your position is only defensible if you don't believe that there are diseases that can kill or cripple you. While I wish that were true, that's not the world we live in.
Can you cite a number of deaths that took place from the latter?
I agree with you on the things you are trying to distract with. You want to smoke? Great, that only impacts you. I want you to be able to make that choice for weed and heroin too. I'm with you on the wars, but that's so far from what we're talking about here it's not worth getting into.
I was a registered capital-L libertarian for many years. I campaigned for Ron Paul before the words "Tea Party" were anything other than a chapter in a history book. I get it.
But the libertarian (small-L) philosophy is let someone have the freedom to do anything they want, as long as it doesn't impact other people's freedoms.
This is one of those things. Anti-vax people are impacting my life, are impacting my kids life, impinging on my safety and well being and my kids well being.
If society isn't going to enforce a law about that, then what's the point?
A more reasonable approach would be to bar non-vaccinated kids from public school and let private schools and home schooled children decide for themselves. That's the only law that I support.
We've regulated cigarettes to the point where they're mostly a threat to those who choose to use them. We let you trade your own health/safety for your own liberty.
Choosing not to vaccinate doesn't benefit anyone and does cause harm to other people. We're letting you trade our health/safety for your own liberty.
If you want to harm yourself, that's okay. If you want to put people at risk for society's benefit, that's okay. If you want to put society at risk because you don't believe in science, that's not okay.
Granted, war sucks.
WHAT?!
Let me fix that for you so that it actually follows the scenario:
"If you want to put society at risk because you don't want to [potentially] harm yourself (it happens with vaccines), that's not okay."
And that is crap. Society (as government) has the right to force every individual to play Russian roulette?
And the risk from not getting it effects not just yourself.
So, yeah, were the odds in Russian Roulette were such that playing it dramartically increased your health and safety and the health and safety of those around you, yes, the government should require it. But since those aren't the odds of Russian Roulette, it seems like a pretty dishonest analogy to use.
Vaccines are a great example of a personal choice that does hurt other people, despite seeming like something that impacts only you.
Why? In short, because herd immunity is far more powerful than individual immunity, and protects even people who cannot be vaccinated. By choosing not to vaccinate, you chip away at herd immunity.
Actually, a couple anti-vaxxers would be OK. Herd immunity, as I said, allows for some people to safely be unvaccinated, and that is why it is powerful. The problem is when anti-vax'ing became a movement with the goal of convincing as many people as possible not to vaccinate.
I wonder if this would even be an issue if we would flip the equation a bit: you don't have to get your kids vaccinated, but then they have to go to a school filled with other unvaccinated kids. This wouldn't solve the overall problem, but it would do some 'fear aikido', redirecting them to see that they are trading a nebulous risk for a very real one.
I think that's both a more effective and humane approach to the danger posed by non-vaccination than the also-defensible alternatives of allowing people to make that decision but then legal prohibiting them from most public intercourse, or just punishing anyone who is found to have, as a responsible adult, chosen not to vaccinate themselves or their child to a disease where they knew, or reasonably should have known, an effective vaccine was available, without a valid medical reason, and where the person so unvaccinated then transmitted the disease to a third party, for battery or, in the event that death results, murder of the depraved indifference type (as well as, of course, allow civil damages against those responsible adults for the resulting harms.)
You don't get the sense the author condemns the practice. It's a strong statement from an anarcho-syndicalist like Traven. At least he was aware of the fact that everyone lives downstream of someone. With today's libertarians you get the strong notion that they imagine each of them living in their own bubble in Low Earth Orbit.