Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Freedom to Starve

We were sold a freedom that leaves out the part that counts, the power to say no, and New Hampshire keeps voting to keep it that way.

Run the numbers on a full-time job at New Hampshire’s minimum wage and you get $15,080 a year before taxes. That is the legal floor in this state in 2026, the same $7.25 an hour it has been since 2009, held flat while rent, groceries, and gas climbed past it every year. A person living on that floor does not negotiate with an employer. He complies, because the alternative is no food and no roof over his kid. We have a comfortable word for his condition. We call him free.

That word is carrying more weight than it can hold. A freedom that contains no power to refuse is not a freedom a hungry person can spend. And here is the part that should keep you up at night. The one grim security that older forms of forced labor carried, a stake held by someone in keeping the laborer alive, has no equivalent in your life at all. Your survival is nobody’s investment. The system calls that independence. In practice it reads as abandonment.

The freedom they sell you

More than a century ago the French writer Anatole France described a law of “majestic equality” that forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal bread. The joke was that a rule can be perfectly equal on paper and savage in practice, because only one side ever needs to sleep under the bridge. The freedom Americans are raised to salute works the same way. You are free to quit. You are free to start a business, to move, to walk out on a bad boss. Try exercising any of it with an empty account and a child to feed.

In New Hampshire the imbalance is written into the law. This is an at-will employment state, a doctrine the state Supreme Court laid down in 1981: absent a contract, either side can end the job at any time, with or without cause. On paper that cuts both ways. In a kitchen or a warehouse it does not. The employer can replace you by Friday; you cannot replace the paycheck. A worker who can be let go for no reason, and who goes hungry without the wage, is not standing on equal ground with the person signing his check. He is standing on a trapdoor.

And the wage under his feet has not moved in seventeen years. New Hampshire pins its minimum to the federal rate of $7.25, set in 2009 and frozen since. When a handful of legislators filed a bill this year to raise it in steps toward $17 by 2029, the House let it die on the table on March 12, voting 159 to 183 against even taking it back up for debate. Every other New England state sets its floor higher; some are more than double ours. New Hampshire picked the basement and bolted the door.

The owner’s terrible arithmetic

It is tempting to push the comparison all the way and say the modern worker is worse off than a slave. That is false, and it matters that it is false. Chattel slavery meant a human being owned outright, bought and sold, with no claim to his own body, his own labor, or his own children, subject to violence and to sale with no recourse, the condition fixed by law and handed down to the next generation. None of that describes a renter with a bad job in Northfield. You hold legal personhood. You can vote, quit, organize, sue, and publish. You cannot be sold. Anyone who flattens that difference insults the people it was done to and hands every critic a reason to stop reading at the first line.

But narrow the comparison to a single cold variable and something uncomfortable surfaces. An enslaved person was capital. In 1860, by the National Park Service’s own accounting, the market value of the enslaved in this country was greater than the combined worth of every railroad, factory, and bank in the nation, the single largest asset class in the American economy. Property valued that highly gets protected. A slaveholder had a direct financial reason to keep the people he owned alive, fed, and able to work, the way a man maintains a machine he paid for. The logic was monstrous. The incentive was also real.

Now ask who holds that stake in you. Nobody does. Your employer loses nothing if you fall over; there is another applicant in the inbox. Your landlord re-lists the unit. The state deletes a row from a spreadsheet. You are not anyone’s asset, and the freedom you were handed in exchange for that status turns out to mean your survival is your problem and yours alone. That is the trade almost no one says out loud. We abolished the owning of people, which was right and long overdue, and we built in its place a system that takes the labor and disowns the responsibility.

Your survival, on conditions

Watch how survival itself gets rationed and the picture sharpens. In this country, health coverage runs mostly through a job. Employer plans are the single largest source of insurance in the United States, covering more than 150 million people. But the coverage follows income in a cruel pattern. Among working-age adults, employer insurance reaches better than four in five of the highest earners and barely one in five of those near the poverty line. The people with the thinnest cushion are the least likely to hold a job that hands them a doctor. Lose the job and you can lose the medicine that keeps you able to work in the first place.

For the poorest adults the backstop is Medicaid, and New Hampshire is busy tying strings to it. The two-year budget Governor Kelly Ayotte signed in June 2025 directs the state to require able-bodied adults on expanded Medicaid, the roughly 60,000 people in the Granite Advantage program, to document 100 hours a month of work or approved activity to keep their coverage. The state has run this play before. In 2018 it imposed the same kind of rule and, within months, found that about 17,000 people stood to lose coverage, not because they would not work but because they could not get the paperwork filed in time. The state suspended it in 2019.

The premise does not survive contact with the data. A 2023 analysis by KFF, the health policy research group, found that roughly 64 percent of adults on Medicaid nationally already work at least part-time, and most of the rest are caregivers, the ill, the disabled, or people in school. A work requirement does not conjure jobs out of nothing. It conjures forms, and then it cuts off the people who drown in them. The point of the exercise is not employment. It is to make holding onto the floor hard enough that some people fall through.

Who built the cage

None of this is weather. It did not roll in on its own. Every piece of it is a decision, made by people who can be named, recorded in votes you can look up. The wage froze because legislators chose to chain it to a federal number and then chose, session after session, not to move it. The most recent refusal carries a date and a tally: March 12, 2026, 159 to 183. The Medicaid strings exist because they were written into a budget and signed into law. The reason a heart attack can cost you your house is that we decided, and keep deciding, to run health coverage through employers instead of through citizenship.

A system arranged this carefully tends to serve whoever arranged it. Labor that cannot say no is worth a great deal to the people who buy it. Benefits an employer controls are a leash that same employer is glad to hold. The interests on that side of the ledger are well represented in the rooms where these votes happen. The man working two jobs at $7.25 is not in the room. That is not a grand conspiracy. It is just a question of whose preferences get written down as law and whose get left at the door.

The tell

There is a tell in any arrangement this lopsided. It has to keep reminding you how free you are. A person who is truly unbound does not need it announced to him every morning by a flag, a slogan, and a song on the radio. The reminding is the function, because the morning enough people stop believing the word is the morning the arrangement has a problem on its hands.

So look hard at the word. You are not property, and that is no small thing; people bled to make it true, and the distance between a citizen and a chattel is the distance of a whole moral universe. But you were also promised that not being owned would amount to being free, and it does not, not while the only choices on the table are sell your hours on another man’s terms or go without the things that keep you alive. The hard news and the only hopeful news are the same sentence. This was built, which means it can be unbuilt. A frozen wage can thaw. A vote that went 159 to 183 was not unanimous, and the next one is not required to land the same way. A freedom worth the name would carry the power to refuse, and the security that makes refusing survivable. New Hampshire does not hand its people that yet. It could choose to.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. This is an opinion column. Every load-bearing factual claim was checked against the sources listed above; statute text, the bill vote, and the 1860 valuation rest on primary or official sources, while the Granite Advantage enrollment count, the 2018 coverage-loss figure, and the national Medicaid-work share are marked ATTRIBUTED because they rest on reputable reporting and analysis rather than a document this outlet read in full. The “related coverage” link is a placeholder to be filled with the live URL on publication. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.