From John Gruber:
I'm old enough to recall when wearing seat belts became mandatory. Roughly speaking, these laws spread quickly from state to state, starting with New York in 1984 and becoming the rule rather than the exception within a decade. ("Live free or die" New Hampshire is the only remaining state that doesn't require adults to wear a seat belt.)
I recall a similar sort of opposition to these laws as we see now with mandatory face masks. Opposition to compulsory seat belt laws always seemed crazy to me, because the evidence was so overwhelming that seat belts save lives and greatly reduce injuries that it was clearly worth making an exception to the principle, widely held in America, that the government generally shouldn't tell people what to do. But crazy or not, opposition there was. "Fuck you, I don't want to wear one, it's a free country." Word for word, the same sentiment then about seat belts as now about face masks.
One of the arguments against compulsory seat-belt-wearing was that sometimes wearing a seat belt makes things worse. "What if I'm in an accident and my seat belt gets jammed, trapping me in a burning car?" "I read about a guy who wasn't wearing a seatbelt and he walked away from a terrible accident because he was thrown out of the car before it was totaled."
I don't agree with it, but to some degree I get it: What right does a government that sells you lottery tickets have to tell you that your odds are better if you're wearing a seat belt?
But there's a fundamental difference between wearing a seat belt in a car and wearing a face mask in a store. A seat belt really only protects the wearer. There are tangential arguments that society as a whole benefits from fewer car crash deaths and injuries, but the primary reason we have laws requiring you to wear a seat belt is to protect you from harm. Face mask requirements aren't like that. They're more like laws banning smoking in restaurants and making drunk driving a serious crime — they protect us all from harm.
From earlier in my childhood, I recall ubiquitous signs at the entrances of stores and restaurants: "No shirt, no shoes, no service." There were variants, but that exact phrasing was common. I always considered those signs so strange, as I couldn't imagine why anyone would even want to go into a store or restaurant without a shirt or shoes, let alone need a sign telling them that doing so was not permitted, but I figured it must have been a problem with hippies or something. (There were a lot of old people complaining about hippies long after there were any hippies left to complain about.)
Basically, other than poolside or at a beach, anyone who wants to go into a public establishment barefoot or shirtless is an asshole. It seems pretty clear that the people today angrily objecting to mandatory face masks aren't really concerned with the epidemiological efficacy of masks. They're concerned with asserting their perceived entitlement to be an asshole. You don't need to hang a "No assholes allowed" sign to enforce it as a rule.