Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist, revealed on Tuesday that since freedom is a mirage, people have no good reason not to comply with endless government commands. Unfortunately, punitive panaceas are increasingly popular among both politicians and pundits.

Krugman breezily expunges years of Supreme Court rulings to remove any impediment to forcibly injecting a hundred million Americans with an experimental vaccine. Krugman explains that "when people on the right talk about 'freedom' what they actually mean is closer to 'defense of privilege'—specifically the right of certain people (generally white male Christians) to do whatever they want." Blacks and Hispanics have lower rates of COVID vaccinations than whites, but the freedom of minority groups is apparently irrelevant because some Trump supporters are anti-vax loudmouths.

Other progressive stalwarts have jumped on the Iron Fist bandwagon. Pundit Matthew Yglesias declared that people should either take $50 for getting vaccinated now "or else you get jabbed later while someone holds you down and you get $0." Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who previously championed legal immunity for Bush administration torturers and sneered at Americans who complained about intrusive TSA searches, calls for mandating vaccines because it's "time to stop coddling the reckless." Maximizing misery is Marcus's health prescription: "The more inconvenient we make life for the unvaccinated, the better our own lives will be." Similarly, Harvard professor Joseph Allen, writing in the Washington Post on Tuesday, scoffed: "Why are so many people acting like this [vaccine mandate] is some kind of affront to our liberties?…We have a silver bullet that can end this crisis. Why are we afraid to pull the trigger?"

Krugman's condemnation of other Americans hinges on the presumed omniscience of federal regulators. Krugman declares, "We now have highly effective vaccines freely available to every American who is at least 12 years old. There has been a lot of hype about 'breakthrough' infections associated with the Delta variant, but they remain rare."