Don’t Expect Your Government-Employed Friends to Stand Up for Freedom

You wouldn’t be any different: When given the choice between exposing yourself to the virus to go to work and earn your paycheck or not exposing yourself to the virus and earning the exact same paycheck, why would any reasonable person accept the needless risk? This has been the situation for nearly every government or institutionally-employed worker since the beginning of the so-called pandemic.

Think about it: Everyone who works a job (or does anything else in life) accepts a certain level of risk. Whether it is accepting the risk of commuting by car, getting hurt on the job, or the simple opportunity cost of what they can’t do with the time they are working, everyone naturally balances the costs of working their job with the benefits of working. But what if accepting additional risk yields no benefit?

In 2020, most government employees were presented with a no-lose scenario: earn your paycheck while exposing yourself to the unknown risk of the virus, or stay home and earn the same paycheck with no additional risk. What would you do?

For many government workers, there is no upside at all for going back to normal. No risk of losing their livelihood if we don’t. Yes, working from home might present some additional annoyances (teaching online, for example), but for many, it was better than risking exposure to the supposedly deadly pandemic. While there are some government workers who are principled enough to understand the implications for individual freedom at play, many if not most have instinctively landed on the side of perpetual lockdowns and restrictions on free enterprise. It simply doesn’t affect them, especially when we were all told that supporting shutdowns was noble and heroic.

This is not to say government workers are bad people because of this. They are not. They are simply naturally self-interested just like everyone else. In the case of economically-restrictive government action, we cannot expect them to side against their own interests, which are decidedly pro-lockdown and pro-government power. It is perfectly natural for a person to line up behind the company or industry that they work for, even if their position is harmful to the rights of others.

Colorado produces $10 billion more in GDP every year from government services than similarly-populated states like Minnesota and Wisconsin. We have a lot of government employees in this state, and it is perfectly understandable that many of them have dutifully lined up behind the pro-lockdown and freedom-stripping institutional elites. Our fellow citizens who work for the government are entitled to the same freedoms of speech as everyone else, but we would be wise to understand the obvious conflict of interest found in the fact that lockdowns haven’t hurt them financially at all, and take anything they say with a grain of salt. They simply can’t be counted on to fight for economic freedom.