Photo by Tim Dennell via Flickr

No Vaccination against Unlimited Political Power

by James Bovard, May 18, 2025

Late in the last century, theater goers were jolted when a character in the X-Files movie declared that the Federal Emergency Management Agency can allow “the White House to suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency.” If the same line was used before thoughtful movie audiences nowadays, the response might be bitter cat calls or perhaps expletives unfit to quote on a high-toned website.

Five years ago, politicians in scores of nations proclaimed that they possessed almost unlimited power over everyone living in their domain. Around the globe, constitutional restrictions on presidents, prime ministers, and any other ruler vanished practically overnight. Those power grabs could not have occurred if they were not preceded by a vast increase in political illiteracy regarding Leviathan.

For more than half a century, experts and pundits have assured people that government power is far less dangerous than it appears. Even the most brazen abuses were usually ignored or papered over. In 1977, East Germany ransomed hundreds of its leading intellectuals and artists to West Germany because it did not wish to endure public criticism by its own citizens during an International Human Rights Conference. In spite of the human sale, there was no general revulsion against the East German government abroad.

The East German regime was considered by many social scientists to have more legitimacy than the West German government thanks to an expansive social welfare system and its paternalist pretensions. Western experts similarly disregarded the oppressions inflicted by almost any certified progressive regime. Okay, the Khmer Rouge did go too far, but otherwise…

How many of its citizens does a government need to sell before it loses legitimacy? How many of its subjects does a government have to pawn before all its subjects are recognized as essentially slaves?

Politicians here and abroad accumulated vast power despite eloquent warnings going back almost 500 years. French philosopher Etienne de la Boetie observed in 1563, “It is fruitless to argue whether or not liberty is natural, since none can be held in slavery without being wronged.” In 1691, English philosopher John Locke wrote: “Nobody can desire to have me in his Absolute Power, unless it be to compel me by force to that, which is against the Right of my Freedom, i.e., make me a slave.”

When the Continental Congress issued its formal Appeal to Arms in 1775, it declared, “We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery.” Historian John Phillip Reid wrote, “The word ‘slavery’ did outstanding service during the revolutionary controversy, not only because it summarized so many political, legal, and constitutional ideas and was charged with such content. It was also of value because it permitted a writer to say so much about liberty.” Though some of the rhetoric of the 1760s and 1770s seems overheated by modern standards, those thinkers recognized how unlimited government power meant perpetual degradation to its victims.

Americans in that era had a vivid concept of governmental authorities “going too far.” The early state constitutions and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights sought to craft institutions to keep government forever humbled to the citizenry. But in a series of decisions by Chief Justice John Marshall in the early 1800s, the Supreme Court invented sovereign immunity and thereby made it far more difficult to hold government officials culpable for their abuses.

Political slavery is revealed at those moments when the path of the citizen and the State cross — when the citizen suddenly becomes aware of his complete legal insignificance. Slavery is not a question of political intent. The greater the State’s legal superiority over the citizen, the closer the citizen becomes to a slave. Modern political slavery means politicians having absolute power over citizens — the transformation of individual citizens with inviolable rights into mere social, economic, and cannon fodder — into disposable building blocks for their ruler’s fame and glory.

The question of whether people are essentially political slaves does not turn on how often government agents beat them, but on whether government agents possess the prerogatives and immunities that allow such beatings at their discretion. The measure of chattel slavery was the extent of the slaveowners’ power, not the number of lash marks on the slave’s back. Slavery is not an all-or-nothing condition. There are different gradations of slavery, as there are different gradations of freedom.

Because they had personal experience being oppressed by a foreign regime, the Founding Fathers sought to craft a government that would be forever subservient to the law. If the rulers are above the law, then law becomes merely a tool of oppression. If rulers are above the law, citizens have the same type of freedom that slaves had on days when their masters chose not to beat them.

While average folks still intuitively recognize the value of freedom in their own lives, plenty of elitists tout subjugation as salvation. Almost 50 years after the East German regime pawned its intellectuals, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is championing serfdom — at least for the mass of humanity. The WEF promised young people that by the year 2030, “you will own nothing and be happy.” Recent political reforms in many nations have furthered the first promise, ravaging private-property rights and subverting individual independence.

Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts warned: “The plan of the Great Reset is that you will die with nothing. Klaus Schwab’s ‘life by subscription’ is really serfdom. It’s slavery. Billionaire, globalist corporations will own everything — homes, factories, farms, cars, furniture — and everyday citizens will rent what they need, if their social credit score allows.” WEF is also a leading cheerleader for censorship — the only way to stop hecklers from referring to it as the “World Enslavement Forum.”

The Covid-19 pandemic epitomized how easily politicians can act as if they practically own billions of citizens. After the Trump administration saw how the Chinese government rigorously repressed its populace after the Covid outbreak, the US adopted some of the same heavy-handed policies. On March 16, 2020, Trump endorsed “15 Days to Slow the Spread” — a slogan that would live in infamy. Freezing the economy and daily life and shutting down schools would supposedly magically vanquish the virus. On April 13, 2020, Trump revealed, “The federal government has absolute power. It has the power. As to whether or not I’ll use that power, we’ll see.”

Wildly inaccurate forecasts of future infections sufficed for politicians to turn the Constitution into Covid roadkill. Hundreds of millions of Americans were effectively placed under house arrest. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a deluge of decrees in March and April 2020 after the state legislature gave him “authorization of absolute power,” as the New Yorker declared. The mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, banned drive-in church services at the same time he permitted drive-through liquor stores to remain open. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti banned all unnecessary “travel, including, without limitation, travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, or public transit.” Attorney General Bill Barr aptly called the lockdowns “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery.

In 2020, presidential candidate Joe Biden condemned Trump for not seizing far more power to pretend to keep everyone safe from everything. On March 11, 2021, the first anniversary of Covid lockdowns, President Biden donned rhetorical military epaulets and announced on television: “I’m using every power I have as the President of the United States to put us on a war footing to get the job done. Sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it, a war footing.”

To assure victory, Biden sought to commandeer every arm in the nation. Biden betrayed an earlier promise and dictated that more than a hundred million American adults working for private companies must get the Covid vaccine. (Biden had already compelled federal employees and members of the military to get the injections.) In his September 2021 televised speech announcing the mandate, Biden brazenly lied, minimizing the snowballing failure of the vaccines to prevent infections and transmission.

Instead, Biden castigated the unvaxxed: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” Biden’s declaration sounded like a dictator’s threat prior to invading a foreign nation. But Biden was only going to force people to get an experimental injection that could cause myocarditis and other heart problems, so what’s the problem? The Supreme Court struck down most of the Biden vaccine mandate in January 2022.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito lamented that the pandemic “has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” But ravishing freedom failed to prevent more than 200 million Americans from becoming infected with Covid. Amazingly, the failure of repressive Covid decrees has done nothing to humble the political class.

Unfortunately, the government has no liability for the injections it mandates or the freedoms it destroys. Despite pervasive abuses, not a single government official spent a day in jail for the most politically exploited pandemic in American history. The crowning indignity of the pandemic occurred on Biden’s final day in office when he granted a sweeping pardon to Covid czar Anthony Fauci for everything Fauci did in the prior ten years. But what sort of savior scientist needs a presidential pardon so sweeping to protect him even against charges of genocide?

As Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. declared last week, “Anthony Fauci essentially restarted the bio-weapons arms race and did it under the pretention of developing vaccines — eventually moving his experiments offshore, mainly to the Wuhan Lab.” Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, declared on May 1, “We are working with Jay Bhattacharya, the new NIH director on this, as well as Secretary Kennedy is looking at the gain of function research that in the case of the Wuhan Lab, as well as many others.

Many of these other biolabs around the world were actually US-funded and led to this dangerous kind of research that, in many examples, has resulted in either a pandemic or some other major health crisis.” NIH chief Bhattacharya slammed the entire pharma foundation for the Covid vaccines: “The next step is [to halt] the mRNA platform itself…the manufacturer has no idea what dose they’re giving, no idea where it goes in the body, and whether they are producing off-target antigens.” Big Pharma could be utterly reckless because politicians nullified all the legal rights of people who were forced to get their injections.

Trump administration appointees are promising to open the files and expose more of the lies and abuses that propelled Covid-19 policies. Washington owes full disclosure to everyone whose life was thrown into turmoil by Covid edicts. But there must also be an unflinching analysis of how so many Americans’ political thinking went so far astray as to blindly trust any government official who recited the phrase “Science and data.”

In the same way that every military invasion raises questions of national sovereignty, every regulatory invasion by officialdom should raise questions about the sovereignty of individuals over their own lives. What pretexts justify government massively transgressing the border of the individual’s own life? And is there any way to hold political intruders liable under the law? 

“Absolute power with impunity kills” is one of the clearest lessons of the pandemic. How many Americans now recognize that fighting Covid with an iron fist was an unmitigated disaster? There will never be a vaccine to protect citizens against unlimited political power.

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An earlier version of this piece was published by The Libertarian Institute