In case you haven’t yet grasped just how insidious the idea of occupational licensing really is, here’s a reminder from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking to the truckers in the Freedom Convoy:
If you joined the protests because you’re tired of COVID, you now need to understand that you are breaking laws. You don’t want to end up losing your license, end up with a criminal record, which will impact your job, your livelihood.
You can be pretty sure that President* Biden (or his handlers) will be saying something similar to our own version of the convoy, when it arrives in DC. And that Emperor Sununu would take the same line if a convoy arrived in Concord.
Although Article 83 of our own state constitution has been twisted like a pretzel to rationalize a state monopoly on education, if you actually read it, you’ll see that it exists to prevent all monopolies and conspiracies that hinder or destroy the inherent and essential right of the people to free and fair competition in the trades and industries.
Which is to say, it forbids occupational licensing laws (in the same way that Article 2-a forbids gun control laws), and it does so precisely to take away from government the power to threaten someone’s ability to make a living in order to force compliance with illegitimate statutes, regulations, executive orders, and court orders — in short, to force submission to tyranny.
In other words: A government that can make you ask permission to make a living is a government that can starve you by withholding that permission until you do what it demands.
If COVID has taught us anything, it’s that whatever good we imagine comes from occupational licensing (which in the end, is always about protecting jobs rather than protecting consumers), it doesn’t begin to compare to the evils that it has enabled in the hands of government officials who claim that ‘public health trumps everything’, and are willing to crush anyone who disagrees with them.
