The COVID measures had nothing to do with health and everything to do with road testing totalitarian governance. From Millenial Rabble at theburningplatform.com:
One of the most powerful and under appreciated developments after JFK is the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSH Act). It created Federal OSHA housed within the US Department of Labor and a host of requirements to go along with it. It is breathtaking in scope because it simultaneously subjects both private employers and the States that regulate them to DC bureaucracy.
As with several of these landmark pieces of legislation that trashed Constitutional governance, this one had a kernel of truth to it. There is a collective action obstacle to efficient markets where employers have a lot more knowledge of and benefit from placing employees in danger while it’s much more difficult for employees to negotiate fair compensation for the danger and/or changes in practices to mitigate the danger in favor of a safe and healthful workplace (that’s a magic phrase in OSHA World).
So one obvious solution to this, and one where you don’t have to be a true believer in central authority to understand the logic, is for there to be basic national standards regarding the most obvious hazards, the things that clearly pose a danger of death or serious physical harm. The stuff nobody would disagree with that big evil corporations (I repeat myself) should of course have to take into consideration. And that’s almost what the OSH Act does.
But not quite.
