Are We Free Men? Losing New Hampshire Liberties

A great editorial from the New Hampshire Union Leader about the nanny state on it’s way to New Hampshire:

MAJORITIES IN THE State House and Senate, elected in a fit of anger at a President and his unpopular war and ineffectual political party, are on the verge of making state government into a cosmic blacksmith’s shop in which legislators swing their hammer and reshape the citizens’ souls upon the anvil of the law.

New Hampshire always has been a state in which the character of the people shapes government policy, not the other way around. That could change on Thursday, when legislators consider two bills written to force individuals to adopt behaviors of which legislators approve.

“Shall we mould our citizens to the law, or the law to our citizens? And in solving this question their peculiar character is an element not to be neglected,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Quincy Adams in 1817.

Jefferson, like New Hampshire’s founders, believed that the law should not be used to shape a people’s character or habits. Rather, the people’s character or habits should be reflected in the law. Yet molding citizens to the law is exactly what House Bill 802, mandating adult seat belt use, and Senate Bill 42, banning smoking in bars and restaurants, attempt to do.

Each bill is intended to replace the judgment of individuals with the collective judgment of the 424 people who happen to be elected at this moment.

“The laws . . . which must effect (a people’s happiness) must flow from their own habits, their own feelings, and the resources of their own minds,” Jefferson wrote to William Lee in 1817. “No stranger to these could possibly propose regulations adapted to them. Every people have their own particular habits, ways of thinking, manners, etc., which have grown up with them from their infancy, are become a part of their nature, and to which the regulations which are to make them happy must be accommodated.”

Granted, the legislators proposing these laws were elected by the people of New Hampshire. But the ideas behind the bills are antithetical to New Hampshire tradition and the state’s independent way of life. The bills are adaptations of laws passed in other states — states where the people are more accustomed to obeying the dictates of government.

House Bill 802 and Senate Bill 42 may seem harmless bills. But pass them and New Hampshire begins its descent into the dark chambers of state control, where the state maintains unquestioned supremacy over the individual.

The question is not whether the behavior that would be enforced by these laws is positive or negative. It is whether the irresistible force of law ought to be used to shape the very character of a people, whether merely exercising the option of enjoying a cigarette with a meal or driving to the store without buckling up is to be punished by the state for the sole reason that the state prefers that you make a different choice.

A vote for these bills is a vote against freedom of conscience. A vote against them is a vote to maintain the individual’s primacy over the state. It is a vote for keeping New Hampshire the most free and independent state in a union increasingly antithetical to Jefferson’s prescription that a good government is one “securing to us our dearest rights and the practical enjoyment of all our liberties.”

All our liberties, Jefferson was careful to write. Not just the ones the government approves.

We residents of New Hampshire have always prided ourselves on being independent, with little government intervention in our lives. However, last November voters decided to send the president a message about the war. New Hampshire sent two new anti-war representatives to Wash. D.C. Fine, I didn’t agree with it, but I lost.

In the voters shortsightedness they also voted out most state Republicans. This, of course had no effect on the war because they are in state government, but they did it anyway. Blinded by hatred for the president they voted for the same type of state candidates that New Hampshire voters have always voted against.

Now we are facing the nanny state and higher taxes we have always opposed.

New Hampshire voters, you let me down last November, I thought you were smarter than that. I hope you enjoy having every last aspect of your lives regulated.

Get out your pacifiers, babies, the government is here to take care of you.