They're both on the same slippery slope of governmental punishment of wrongthink. Saudi Arabia is just way, way further along on it.

Banning lead from gasoline (and paint, plumbing etc) is also governmentally-punished wrongthink, if you’ve built your whole identity and livelihood around being a salesman for leaded gasoline.

Or. Could a certified driving instructor lose their license for telling their clients to drive aggressively, regardless of safety concerns? They might just become a brave martyr challenging the safety-obsessed culture that coddles our drivers.

Wrongthink is inherently about expressing ideas. Contrast actually putting lead in things with saying that you wish you could put lead in things.

Hence the “salesman” part. The government is technically depriving you of your livelihood because your employer is out of business, or has moved to non-leaded gasoline, but you insist on only selling leaded gasoline, because you sincerely believe it is superior. Now you are out of a job. (Or rather: now there’s talk going around that you might be out of a job.)

The solution is that society shouldn’t make people dependent on any single means of income for survival, not that no one gets rejected/disbarred from any occupation ever. Ultimately any negativity towards a person lies along a spectrum, and it’s important not to lose sight of the degree of harm involved.

The revoking of professional licenses is not (and should not be) intended as punishment of the individual in question, but rather limiting the damage to society of their recklessness.

That can sometimes be a slippery slope of its own, but I will argue that it’s a somewhat different slope (the “for the greater good” slope) from the “totalitarian government hates nonconformity” slope. Sometimes they intersect though.