In the 1960s and 1970s, a draft card represented an unlimited claim on your freedom, and even your life. If you had one, the government could, at its discretion, and without your consent, uproot your entire existence, until it decided to relinquish that claim. Does that sound familiar?
What many people are beginning to realize is that an occupational license represents a similar claim. A license is permission to pursue a livelihood — permission to keep yourself and your family alive — and it can be withdrawn instantly, incoherently, and indefinitely.
Like a draft, occupational licensing is incompatible with the idea of a ‘free country’, let alone a country founded on the principle that governments are formed to protect rights, and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
(Occupational licensing is also blatantly incompatible with Article 83 of the New Hampshire Constitution, which tasks the government with protecting the inherent and essential right to free and fair competition in the trades and industries against all monopolies and conspiracies which tend to hinder or destroy it. Licensing is, by definition, exactly such a monopoly.)
Drafts and occupational licensing are both based on the same underlying idea: That you belong, not to yourself, but to the government, as a kind of resource to be deployed ‘for the common good’, or ‘to protect public health’, or in service of some other government interest.
It took time, but people who had been issued draft cards gradually began to recognize that the only reasonable way to deal with them was to burn them. It’s already clear that the same is true of occupational licenses.
