I was thinking about the Basecamp stuff today

It made me wonder if businesses will ever reach out to gov't *themselves* and say "please pass a law banning politics from the workplace, we're too scared of our employees to do it ourselves"

and I was thinking about how people would be like "even if businesses wanted that, it would be a bad law b/c it's a violation of the 1st amendment, those businesses should grow up and just do it themselves & enforce it on their own"

And then (oh boy here we go) I realized this is *exactly* the argument that people have made in favor of state-wide mask mandates

They say that businesses really *do* want these mandates but are unwilling to enforce them on their own so they plead to the state gov't to do it

But if you turn that around, you realize that (just like an anti-politics-in-the-workplace law) a state mandate also forces businesses who *don't* want a mask mandate to have one.

It really makes the pro-mandate argument look ridiculous when you cast it in any other context