We got rid of debtors’ prisons centuries ago, yet why do we allow the state to imprison our fellow citizens for working?
As you know, we have licensing laws for many professions and for many of those professions that is a good thing. It is the extent to which we have licensing that sometimes raises an issue as special interests such as the profession itself or the trade schools get more restrictive rules imposed by the legislature to limit competition or enrich themselves at the expense of the citizen who only wants to work.
I submit to you that the freedom to work with your hands and back to put food on your plate and the plates of your children is a human right and is on the same level as freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion and the right to bear arms!
In Connecticut, however, if you work on someone’s home or property without a home improvement contractor’s license, the state can arrest you. If you cut someone’s hair as a barber without a license, the state can arrest you. So let’s decriminalize working.
Then there is the issue of potentially jailing a mother or father when they go to visit their son or daughter if the mother or father is behind on child support payments. The War on the Family, which was also known as the War on Poverty, decimated marriage and the nuclear family in poor rural and urban areas of America.
Now the state pushes further and threatens a mother or father, who is behind on child support, with arrest. Why does the administrative state keep the two most amazing people in a child’s life, the mother and father, away from the child by threat of arrest? This is also known as the “The Magic Trick” where the so-called “non-judgmental’ people can end up taking a citizen’s liberty in their ultimate judgment.
The article “The Magic Trick,” explores this abuse further. Lets “decriminalize” the failure to pay child support.
Peter Thalheim of Greenwich is a Republican candidate for governor.