Can you be more specific? It's the nebulousness of what "can harm" that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Taken to one extreme, there's almost nothing you can do that doesn't potentially harm others. For example, I could leave my stove burner on and burn down the entire apartment building. So many things come with risks to others, and those things are just part of existing in society.
Yes, actually. The Tenth Amendment does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_power_(United_States_co...
> In United States constitutional law, police power is the capacity of the states to regulate behavior and enforce order within their territory for the betterment of the health, safety, morals, and general welfare of their inhabitants.[1] Police power is defined in each jurisdiction by the legislative body, which determines the public purposes that need to be served by legislation.[2] Under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the powers not delegated to the Federal Government are reserved to the states or to the people.
Now I'm not marching in the street or anything like that, but the more I'm told we must follow authoritarian orders without significant compelling evidence, while dissenting voices are being censored, the more appealing the idea is to me, just as a matter of principle. Favor force over reason, and you might get the same in return.
Vaccines.
The government has the right to require your children to have vaccines before they go to school because not doing so has extremely harmful effects on others when we drop below herd immunity.
Smoking.
The government has the right to create anti-smoking laws because the market simply wouldn't produce a non-smoking bar that wouldn't affect the health of the people actually working there.
Shall I go on?
You should, because you'll quickly realize that there are far, far more activities that potentially cause harm to others than there are laws that prohibit them. Also, vaccines and smoking have a history that are peppered with lawsuits about their legality, so as far as examples go, they are not the ones I would hold up as evidence of laws that people clearly think are constitutional.
The flu killed ~50,000 last year in the USA. Do we require all non-essential businesses to shut down and everyone quarantine? Is there some magical cutoff number between 50,000 (flu deaths) and 80,000 (COVID deaths) where we decide to shut down the entire country?
Also you're conflating "the government has the right" with "there exists a law." The government has the right to enforce the law, but there is no innate right in that law itself. If we overturned smoking laws tomorrow, it doesn't remove rights from the government, it removes laws that the government enforces.
Only if the school is run by the government. The government has no right to enforce vaccination on children who go to private schools or are home schooled.
In other words, the government's right in this case stems from owning the school, not from a general right to micromanage every aspect of people's lives.
> The government has the right to create anti-smoking laws
No, it doesn't. It was allowed to pass such laws because smokers had become obnoxious enough in insisting on their "right" to smoke everywhere (which didn't used to be the case--houses and other places once had special rooms for smoking, precisely because smokers had enough manners not to obtrude their activities on non-smokers) that non-smokers picked the lesser of two evils and allowed the government to overreach its power rather than have practically all public spaces be unlivable.
This is not entirely accurate.
>> The government has the right to create anti-smoking laws because the market simply wouldn't produce a non-smoking bar that wouldn't affect the health of the people actually working there.
This was likely due to market failure, not due to health reasons.
