Rhode Islanders Protest Dem's Proposed Tax On Un-Jabbed

P. Gardner Goldsmith | April 25, 2022
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Last Saturday, dozens of Rhode Island residents protested against a bill that would tax the un-jabbed at a level that could double their state income tax.

The bill is called S-2552, and its prime sponsor is State Senator Sam Bell, who, as Jacobin Magazine reports, was elected in 2018 as “the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to be elected to the Rhode Island General Assembly.”

Curiously, it fits right in with the collectivist view of individual choice, health, personal earnings, and the omnipotence of the state – views that have ties that can be traced back to eugenics and dangerous Supreme Court rulings that must be cited as the offenses they are.

As ABC6 Rhode Island reports:

Senator Bell’s (bill) would charge unvaccinated tax payers in Rhode Island $50 a month, and could potentially double their income tax.

‘It’s probably one of the most unconstitutional bills I’ve ever heard of,' said protest organizer Nicholas Morrell. 'This is dictatorship. This is just completely uncalled for and unacceptable.’

The bill mandates that all persons age 16 or over who pay Rhode Island income taxes must be jabbed, and all eligible children under 16 years must be jabbed, or their parents will pay, pay, pay.

 

Related: CT Legislature Preps a Revocation of Religious Exemptions For Mandated Injections | MRCTV

(a) Every person of at least sixteen (16) years of age who is eligible for immunization against COVID-19 and who resides in the State of Rhode Island, works in the State of Rhode Island, or pays personal income taxes to the State of Rhode Island pursuant to chapter 30 of title 44 shall be required to be immunized against COVID-19. (b) Every resident of Rhode Island eligible for immunization against COVID-19 who is under sixteen (16) years of age or under guardianship shall be required to be immunized against COVID-19, with the responsibility for ensuring compliance falling on all parents or guardians with medical consent powers pursuant to § 23-4.6-1.

Of course, we should remind “peace-loving socialists” and “common-sense gun-grabbing” Democrats (usually one and the same) that should a person not “pay, pay, pay,” they will be cited for breaking the law, and armed agents of the state will be sent to arrest them. Should the victim not want to be arrested, and use violence in a defensive attempt to resist, the armed agents of the state are permitted to employ violence to the point of taking the victim’s life.

After all, we’re all in this together, right?

One need not mention that the survivability rate for COVID-19 is near 100 percent for most people. Likewise, one need not mention that the jabs are less effective than naturally acquired immunity, or that the risk of a child being put at risk by COVID-19 is next to nil.

This move is about power: the power to take the earnings of other people through taxation and the bogus claim of “state authority” to do so, the power to command compliance of residents to accept the injection of a fluid that could cause great permanent harm or death, the compliance of residents to commands over how to raise their children.

But it is the mentality that has fueled collectivism since Plato first proposed it in “The Republic”, claiming that literature, art, work, even reproduction would be dictated by the state, for the “greater good.”

And it is what drove the terrible Supreme Court ruling in the case of Jacobson v Mass in 1905 that claimed a state could fine a Lutheran minister who did not want to be forcibly injected. That decision not only rabidly attacked the Fourth Amendment, and other major aspects of the Bill of Rights, it subsequently was used as the crux of the 1927 decision in “Buck v. Bell”, which allowed the forced sterilization of a 17-year-old woman. As Barbara Loe Fisher wrote, tracing how the two rulings were used:

By 1932, mandatory sterilization laws had been passed in 29 states.  More than 60,000 Americans were involuntarily sterilized by public health officials before the barbaric medical practice was ended by most, but not all, states in the late 1940s.29

And, yes, that coincided with the rise of the eugenics movement and Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood. Contemporary tyrants like Bell try to get away with their vile attacks on Natural Rights by assuming that the very existence of government gives them near omnipotence, that the government somehow “represents the public will,” allowing them to disregard the constitutional constraints that are supposed to protect the bulk of our rights against majority or special interest attack, and letting them apply the label “public” virtually every private place we visit.

But if there were more respect for private property and voluntary association, they could not make their grand claims that you cannot visit a shop unless you’re “jabbed.” If they properly respected the fact that businesses, houses, and all places not supported by tax cash are private, we could decide the levels of safety or laxity we want.

Instead, we have the growth of the police state, and politicians like this man who would like to tax people, a-la Massachusetts fining Jacobson in 1905.

There are powerful reasons to know history.

One of them is to recognize the evils that people repeat.

This is one of those instances.

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