Why mandatory medicine is a bad idea

If you’re like me, you know that there are medical prescriptions or procedures A, B, and C, which if everyone followed around you, would make everyone including ourselves safer. What these procedures or prescriptions are isn’t important for the context of this article, the important thing is they exist and you believe in them. If there were no medical procedures or prescriptions which you believed would benefit us were everyone to take them, then of course this proof would be over already.

So for the sake of this web-proof, so we have something non-trivial to do, assume for a moment that such a procedure or prescription exists. It is not only good for the people receiving it but also helps others, by virtue of the fact that not having sick people around is better for the general health. Or for other reasons, whatever they may be.

Got it? There’s a procedure, be it a vitamin, medicine, diet or otherwise, taken orally, intra-muscularly, or otherwise, which we agree would benefit society, or whatever group of people we might have in mind, a school, a nation, a vehicle, were everyone in the group to undertake the procedure.

Despite this, making this medical procedure mandatory for your school/business/country/vehicle is a terrible idea which no one in their right mind would consider implementing. Why? Thanks for asking.

1 – Mandates are unenforceable and logistically infeasible

Are you sure the person had the pill or the shot? Or did they just pay somebody for a paper signature claiming they did? Are you really planning to see if the paperwork checks out for all your customers / citizens / students? Are you checking their blood and then double checking the test kit with other test kits? Maybe you didn’t think this through did you. It’s not logistically feasible to make sure all your students/customers/citizens have or had not gotten whatever dose is appropriate for their body type. In fact it’s immoral to even try, but we’ll get there soon. Are you ready to pay to jail people who produced imperfect paperwork, perhaps counterfeit? Are you ready to put people in jail who had the proper paperwork just because you need to have the jailing infrastructure in place and you know there will be mistakes? What is your plan to deal with black market certificates and doctors having a price?

2 – Mandates are unscientific – they are explicitly anti-science

Mandates require an authority to say what everyone is required to do. Science is explicitly about not having an authority but instead to use the scientific method. As soon as you have a high priest making the decisions, you don’t have to worry about people like Galileo stirring up trouble with some heresies. If you wish to be scientific you need to let people do their own experiments, read the literature, and draw their own conclusions. The proper way to get people to undergo a medical procedure is to convince them scientifically – not through threat of violence and denial of human rights or services! Making the procedure mandatory is only going to make people question it, because such unscientific methodology is immediately suspicious.

3 – Mandates are grossly corruptible

Obviously, forcing all your customers to buy product X means the producer of product X gets rich. As you can tell, this is a grossly corruptible system. Sure, it could work well if everyone is a saint but this is an unstable equilibrium. Some assholes are likely to arrive on the scene at some point, given infinite time. Sadly, this is the actual reason that medical mandates are implemented – because often people really like corruption, when they can tell themselves they benefit from it.

4 – Mandates incur liability

Not everyone is the same. Even a simple procedure like “drink a glass of water before class” which seems totally innocuous will wind up finding somebody getting the water in their lungs, or breaking the glass and cutting their foot, or having some crazy rare allergy to the wax on your paper cup. Now suddenly you are liable for their injury. Is that something you wanted to incur when you got into the business of education / transportation or whatever it is you do? It’s going to be expensive so you better hope you made a lot from the corruption bit in point 3 to cover the lawsuits.

5 – Mandates enable unnecessary conflict

It turns out that we shouldn’t design systems where people are given a chance to hurt others for no reason. If you don’ t know why then go read about the Milgram experiment. In this case, now we have some health official who can mess up any of our customers/students/citizens day if they feel like it. A really bad idea. People are going to have the medical papers ripped up in front of them and then are going to be locked up – that’s the kind of thing that happens if you embark on this path. Giving some kids guns and telling them they can fuck with people they decide deserve it – this has been tried before, go take a look at a history book to see how it turns out.

6 – Mandated medicine violates human rights and indicates psychosis

Medical freedom is a human right, and if we feel the need to control others solely due to our own insecurities and sad hearts it means we are psychotic. If we are psychotic, maybe we should at least be keeping it under wraps don’ t you think? Rather than telling everyone how sad and psychotic our lives are?

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So yeah, this isn’t about whether your favorite medical procedure is a good idea or how safe it is. We agreed that it is a good idea, and that it’s statistically safe. The point is, do you really want to force it on people? Remember “Our bodies, ourselves” ? What are basic human rights to you if you think people shouldn’t get to choose their own medicine? To see people get behind mandatory medicine aka medical fascism and all it implies is really sick. We should be ashamed of ourselves.