In the US, many people who needed (in some cases even scheduled for) medical procedures during 2020 were excluded from the hospitals. Operations and medical procedures were cancelled. Regular checkups were put on hold either by people or their doctors (or both). All because of the Covid panic. This not only caused illnesses to go undetected and untreated, the stark deviation from normal life also caused a great deal of anxiety and stress (and stress can have deadly consequences). Then there were the Covid patients who got sent into the nursing homes where they infected most of the elderly residents with their litanies of preexisting conditions. Yes, more than the usual number of older, more conservative-leaning voters met their demise prior to the election... just coincidence, of course.
You should have proof read this a bit better, I suspect!? Covid-19 and and indeed most other medical conditions are inclined to be unconcerned with a persons political affiliations and inclinations. I think that the main point is that health systems around the world got stretched to and beyond functional operating capacity. And we should all thank God for the tireless efforts of so many of our dedicated health professionals who have gone beyond what might reasonably have been expected of them. Have there been some mistakes? Absolutely. Most of the outbreaks and problems we have had in Australia relate to failures in the protocols or failure to follow protocols. We have had a number of hospital acquired infections, and I fondly remember my father-in-law, now departed this life, who maintained hospitals were the best place to get sick. I think we should be clear. Covid-19 is not a sinister plot by the left to take control. That being said, we should also be alert that there will be those, both to the left and to the right, who may seek to take the opportunity to extend the power of government deeper into the live of everyday citizens. I had to QR code into Church yesterday, and whilst I am quite happy to tell anyone I go to Church, I am not sure I will be happy about the current arrangements continuing indefinitely. Does the Government need to collect data about every time I go to Church? I suspect not. None the less I can accept that for contact tracing to stem the spread of Covid-19 there is presently reasonable cause for the data to be collected, both for my protection and for the protection of my fellow worshippers. Will we still be doing it when we reach the 95% fully vaccinated level?
First, let's return to the basic principle we are discussing, namely the role of government here. And more specifically, that governments are not our rulers, but rather our employees, subservient to us as sovereign citizens. Therefore the numbers questions we keep raising here are entirely secondary. As I said above, even if Covid were Ebola, there is no principled defense for the idea of turning government from our employee into our ruler. That being said, the numbers I cited are supported by evidence, as indicated in the very next post I sent. But whether the mortality is 0.03%, or 1-2% as others have said, makes absolutely no difference to the principle involved, when I made the case that even a 20-50% mortality rate would not sway the principle involved. To restate the principle: the government should always and forever be our employee. Anything else will result in evil. Using Covid statistics, whether real or hype-frenzy-fear-media driven, cannot be allowed to sway our basic understanding of government.
If your argument is to be based on your re-defining definitions then I see nothing fruitful in further discussion. Personal incredulity is also no valid argument.
I am not aware of any teaching in the Christian Faith that we should not use our God-given knowledge to develop medicines to help cure disease. I am unaware of any teaching that we must accept disease because when we die we, hopefully, go to heaven. Why not be there instead as it's a much better place. If you do not want a vaccine that is your personal choice. I can see science is not going to persuade you. However, I do hope that you keep your decision personal and do not persuade others will non-scieitific argument to not have a vaccine. I have had three doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. As I may, therefore, not be around much longer I am going to focus on making sure I am in a state of grace rather than pursue fruitless discussions. Of course, if I do survive I shall be purchasing shares in pharmaceitical companies so when I retire I may have a comforatble retirement.
Strictly speaking, because the essence of law is to command, the sovereign power in any State is whatever person or body is tasked with making the laws. What you are saying would be partially true in a direct democracy, but the sovereignty in question would only be predicated of the citizenry as a whole, not of individual citizens, who would themselves still be subject to the whole, as ultimate lawgiver. The best historical example of this is, of course, ancient Athens. This is not how things work in modern democracies. The people (as a whole) only have sovereignty in the periodic act of electing those who make the laws; at all other times sovereignty is vested in the elected: Congress, in the case of the U.S. In either a direct or a representative system, a “sovereign citizen” (singular) is a contradiction in terms. Law cannot truly be law if every citizen has a veto. That’s tantamount to anarchism, and has little to do with the classical liberal theory of limited government. To speak of government as merely our “employee” represents a very great confusion.
I'm not saying that every citizen should have a veto. It is fine for a citizen to appoint the courts and other checks and balances which keep the various branches of government in check. If we all agree that the government is a servant and a mere employee, then I can rest contented. It's just that in earlier parts of this thread, there was this implication that the government is larger, more important than its citizens, and can sometimes do things against them, or 'for their own good' etc. Whereas what we're saying now is, the government only performs the will of the citizens. It is not its role to do things against citizens 'for their own good' because it is a servant, and not a ruler.
I would still say government is ruler and not merely a servant, for the basic reason that we elect representatives to make laws for us instead of directly enacting them ourselves, and we entrust the enforcement of those laws to state-employed officials, who can and will use force against individual citizens who do not comply with the law. If that’s an employer-employee relationship, then it is utterly unique, and to describe it that way obscures more than it clarifies. I also don’t think there are any limits to the kinds of laws a sovereign legislature can enact. The limiting mechanisms are (1) periodic elections, and (2) competition between political parties for the people’s vote. (In that regard I hold parliamentary systems to be superior to presidential ones, and there is a lot of empirical research out there that supports that contention.)
In most nations of the world, the government is not regarded as the people's servant. Our founding fathers designed the government here to be our servant, but unfortunately we can't expect citizens of other nations to fully share our viewpoint of government. As for US citizens who don't understand the role of our government as the people's servant, well, they probably graduated from high school at a later time when the education system had already begun to be co-opted. Shucks, this was grade-school stuff (reinforced by Civics and Government classes in middle and high school) for us older folks. I don't think they even teach a Government class in most high schools nowadays.
To clarify further, a ‘ruler’ is one who makes the rules, and this very language is applied to Congress no less than 3 times in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. According to Locke, Blackstone, and other classical constitutional and legal theorists whom the Framers followed, the legislative power is supreme over all others, and whoever possesses the legislative power is the true bearer of the State’s sovereignty. In the United States, according to Article 1 of the Constitution, this belongs to Congress, not the people. If words mean anything at all, our elected leaders are indeed our rulers.
public servant noun A person who holds a government position by election or appointment. Those lousy dictionaries are full of false, right-wing misinformation. Blame Trump...
BTW I don’t think anyone here is denying that governments are meant to serve their people. The question is whether they are mere servants, and I contend that the answer to that question is ‘No’, for the reasons stated above. If the story of Jesus teaches us anything, it is that it is possible to be a servant and a ruler at the same time.
I think a teacher of mine put it right when she said we have an elected dictatorship. We, as citizens do choose our governments by voting. However, once they are in power we have no check on their powers until the next election. We often choose to elect the same dictator for several terms in a row. Sometimes governments have to take decisions that are for our own good. That is because sometimes there are decisions that some may take that would be detrimental to the population as a whole. The problem is many think living in a democracy means they ought to be able to do whatever they want. If we were all to do that we would live in anarchy. In a democracy we have to do what the majority wants. People are often only opposed to this when the majority have made a decision they do not like. They think though the system works well when a decision made is the one they would prefer.
That would mean that once they are elected, they are fully within their rights to now do what they want with their office. But that would be incorrect. They are elected to do our will, and to serve our interests, not theirs. If they don’t do that, they violate their fiduciary obligation. They also violate their oath to God, which could even put them in the threat of damnation. That threat of damnation is precisely why we force elected officials to swear by God that they will serve the electorate.
I get where you're coming from, but anyone who has spent any time reading political science literature - and I've only scratched the surface, by my own estimation - knows that there is no consensus about how to determine what the "will of the people" is or even if such a thing exists at all. The notion of a "general will" is a dogma we have inherited from Rousseau. All elections do is empower a certain minority to make decisions on behalf of the people as a whole, with the consent of the majority (assuming the electoral system is constructed properly). Their power is limited primarily by the fixed duration of their office, but also by certain institutional features. The choice between presidential and parliamentary types of regimes is partially a choice between those features being primarily either static ("separation of powers") or dynamic ("separation of parties"). The better part of the existing empirical research favors the latter design choice.
You're overcomplicating things. It's a pretty straightforward case- all elected officials have a duty (under God) to do two things: -strive to enact their campaign promises -uphold the laws of the land That sufficiently encapsulates "the will of the people" during any given election. For example, our president Joe Biden recently issued an order which he thought might be unconstitutional, but did it anyway. That is someone who is violating his fiduciary responsibility to his constituents (the citizens who are the actual holders of sovereignty). And someone who is violating his oath to God, which he made with his hand on the Bible, "I swear to uphold the laws and constitution of the United States". https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-s-blithely-unconstitutional-government/ar-AAMZQ2N Biden's blithely unconstitutional government "Biden knows this and acknowledged it, saying, “The bulk of constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” but then he did it anyway." In Australia, there are similarly unconstitutional lockdowns and beatdowns of average citizens by the police. I just want everyone of us to see that such governments are openly immoral and illegal.
On the contrary, you are oversimplifying. In our first-past-the-post electoral system - which we share with the U.K., Canada, and India - it is entirely possible for a party to win the majority of the seats in the legislature while winning only a minority of the votes cast. In no meaningful sense could carrying out campaign promises under such circumstances be dubbed "the will of the people." Furthermore, people don't vote by line item, they vote for a whole package. If you have an electoral package of proposed policies that consists of 3 main items, it might very well be that only 25% of the voters favor one of them, another 25% favor the second, and another 25% favor the third. If the opposing party favors none of the three, the first party could win 75% of the votes for policies that on their own only had the support of no more than 25% of the population. So even when there is a true correspondence between votes cast and party representation, that still doesn't give one any clear idea as to what the "will of the people" actually is. This is a very basic, well known problem in political science when it comes to talking about "the will of the people". Legislators should indeed uphold the law of the land, but they are also tasked with making the laws, and nearly always under different circumstances than what prevailed when they were elected. Unless you favor some kind of constant referendum - which would arguably not be desirable - their job is to use their best judgment and make those decisions on our behalf. The Constitution ultimately means what the three branches of government agree that it means. If one branch has one vision of what it means and the other two think differently, eventually they will be aligned on the issue. I don't think all the legislators who, for example, passed all the myriad laws that have been struck down by the Supreme Court over the years violated their oath of office just because the legislation ultimately didn't pass muster. Each of the branches has pretty wide discretion when it comes to making determinations as to what's "constitutional" and what's not, and making those decisions is precisely what we elected them to do. Like I said, I get where you're coming from, but with respect, I don't think you've sufficiently thought through the implications of your position and how those come up against the known facts and the current state of the science.
I don't recall the Homily Against Disobedience and Rebellion from the 2d Book of Homilies being brought up in the thread yet, so I'll add it in case it colors anyone's opinions on the subject: http://anglicanlibrary.org/homilies/bk2hom21.htm
I find that a rather naïve opinion of politicians. How better things would be if they did do our will. The matter is compounded by the answer to the question who is us? The entire population does not have a common will. What oath to God? I know you’re in the USA. It would be unconstitutional for any US politician to make an oath to God. Your constitution calls for a clear separation of religion, all religions, and state.