If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that whatever good we imagine comes from occupational licensing, it doesn’t begin to compare to the evil that it has enabled in the hands of government officials who claim that ‘public health trumps everything’ and are willing to pull licenses in order to crush anyone who disagrees with them.

If a visitor from Mars read our Constitution, and looked around at the things the government actually does, how could he reconcile those?

We’ve reached the point where it’s no longer possible, even in theory, to write a law that simply means what it says. And therefore it’s no longer possible for a citizen to be able to know what a law says just by reading it.

For someone to whom ‘the constitution’ means the oral constitution – which is most people, and nearly every government official – the argument that this bill is unconstitutional is the same, in terms of persuasive power, as the argument that I don’t like this bill.