Live Free or Die Is a Slogan. Here Is the Ledger.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

New Hampshire’s own constitution says government exists for the whole community and not for the private gain of any class of men. Two dozen numbers, from Concord to the 13th Amendment, show which side of that line we live on.

Disclosure: Granite State Report has open Right-to-Know disputes with New Hampshire police departments. The ombudsman vacancy described below removes a remedy this outlet would otherwise use.

Here is a sentence I have heard in a hundred versions and said in a few of my own: this country was never for we the people. It runs for profit, we are the livestock, and the best livestock is the kind that thinks the fence is a view. I am going to do what the kitchen-table version never does: check it against the record, number by number, and say where it holds, where it is wrong, and where the truth is worse than the complaint.

Most of it holds. One part does not. Start where New Hampshire starts.

Part First, Article 10, adopted in 1784, says government is instituted for the common benefit of the whole community and not for the private interest or gain of any one man, family, or class of men. It says that when the ends of government are perverted and every other remedy has failed, the people may reform it. Then it turns on the people who do nothing.

So the vocabulary belongs to the founders. The word they chose for a citizen who submits to arbitrary power was slavish. Keep that word. It is more precise than the one in the complaint.

Start with the word slave

The 13th Amendment did not abolish slavery. It abolished slavery with a carve-out, and the carve-out is still law. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States, the text says, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That clause still does work every day. It is the operating authority for prison labor in every state.

The Prison Policy Initiative’s March 2026 count puts nearly 2 million people in American prisons, jails, detention centers, and commitment facilities, at a system-wide cost of at least $445 billion a year, and finds the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on earth. Inside, work is compulsory. The most common prison jobs pay between 86 cents and $3.45 a day by the newest national compilation the group has, and in at least five states they pay nothing. Refuse and you face discipline. The wages go back to the prison for copays and soap.

The same group’s New Hampshire profile puts our incarceration rate at 278 per 100,000 residents, counting prisons, jails, immigration detention, and youth facilities, which means this state locks up a larger share of its people than almost any democracy in the world. About 3,800 people from New Hampshire are behind bars. At least 25,000 different people get booked into our county jails every year. And 43 percent of the people sitting in New Hampshire jails have not been convicted of anything.

That last number is the one to hold onto. Nationally, 465,000 people are locked up before trial, most of them because they cannot make bail. The median felony bail is $10,000. For the typical person who cannot post it, that is eight months of income. The system detains the broke and lets the rest of us call that public safety. In New Hampshire a bail commissioner makes that call, often at two in the morning.

This reaches your street. By the Prison Policy Initiative’s tally, 79 million Americans carry a criminal record and 113 million adults have had an immediate family member spend at least a night in a cell.

The leash you cannot see

The rant says we are slaves. The record says something less dramatic and harder to escape: we are financed.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York counted $18.8 trillion in household debt at the end of June 2026, including $1.65 trillion in student loans, 10.6 percent of it more than 90 days late, and $1.26 trillion on credit cards. The Federal Reserve’s own household survey, fielded in October 2025, found that 37 percent of American adults could not cover a $400 emergency with cash, and 45 percent had no three-month cushion at all.

New Hampshire leads the wrong tables here. The last time the Institute for College Access and Success ranked the states by debt at graduation, for the Class of 2020, New Hampshire graduates carried the highest average in the country: $39,950 each.

Then there is the roof. The New Hampshire Association of Realtors reports the statewide median single-family sale price hit $535,000 in 2025. It was $300,000 in 2019. The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute worked the arithmetic: at that price, with 5 percent down and a 6.6 percent mortgage, a household needed more than $158,000 a year, or $76 an hour, to buy without spending over 30 percent of its income on the payment. About a third of New Hampshire households clear $150,000. The other two-thirds rent from the first third.

Renting is no refuge. The median two-bedroom rent with utilities reached $1,833 in 2024 by New Hampshire Housing’s survey, and 49.4 percent of the state’s renters are cost-burdened. The two-bedroom vacancy rate hit a record low of 0.3 percent in 2022, against the 5 percent that housing economists call a balanced market. Of 15 occupations the state cannot run without, New Hampshire Housing found only two, registered nurses and software developers, earn a median wage that covers a two-bedroom apartment without cost burden. An early childhood educator on the sector median of $33,904 could afford $848 a month.

And the floor under all of it is the lowest in the region. RSA 279:21 pegs New Hampshire’s minimum wage to the federal rate, which has been $7.25 since 2009. Vermont is at $14.42 in 2026, Maine at $15.10, Massachusetts at $15, Rhode Island at $16, Connecticut at $16.94. A full-time worker at New Hampshire’s floor grosses $15,080 a year. The Legislature has had every session since 2009 to move that number and has chosen not to.

None of that is a chain. All of it is a leash, and a leash works better, because the man wearing it walks himself to work.

Who the system answers to

Now the part easiest to sneer at and hardest to refute: the government does not answer to us.

In 2014, Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern published a study in Perspectives on Politics that tested 1,779 national policy questions against the stated preferences of average citizens, economic elites, and organized interest groups. Once the elites’ and the groups’ preferences were held constant, the average citizen’s preference had what the authors called a “non-significant, near-zero” effect on whether the policy passed. Elites and business groups moved policy. The median voter did not.

The study has critics. A 2015 re-analysis by Omar Bashir argued the method understates middle-income influence. The size of the gap is contested. The direction is not.

Follow the money and the direction is obvious. OpenSecrets counted $5.08 billion in federal lobbying in 2025, a record, up 11 percent after inflation. The Federal Reserve’s distributional accounts for the first quarter of 2026 show the top 1 percent of households holding 31.6 percent of the nation’s net worth and the bottom half holding 2.5 percent. The top 1 percent owns 50.2 percent of all stocks and mutual fund shares. The bottom half owes 51.8 percent of all consumer credit. The same statute books produced both numbers.

The counterweight has been sawed through. Union membership was 20.1 percent of wage and salary workers in 1983, the first year the Bureau of Labor Statistics kept comparable numbers. In 2025 it was 10.0 percent, and 5.9 in the private sector.

Concord runs its own version of this. Part Second, Article 15 of the state constitution pays a state representative $200 for a two-year term, plus mileage. We call that a citizen legislature. In practice it is a legislature for citizens who can afford to work for free: the retired, the comfortable, the self-employed. A single mother in Laconia on $7.25 an hour will not be sitting in the House. The constitution does not forbid her. The pay does.

And when a citizen tries to use the one tool the constitution hands everyone, the Right-to-Know Law, the state has been quietly removing the cheap way to enforce it. RSA 91-A:7-a created a Right-to-Know Ombudsman, appointed by the governor and council, and RSA 91-A:7-b let anyone contest a records violation there, for a $25 fee, instead of filing a lawsuit. Then the Legislature cut the office’s pay and budget from $105,000 to $30,000. The first ombudsman, Thomas Kehr, resigned in July 2025. The seat has been empty since July 1, 2025, and every case still pending on June 30 of that year was dismissed. The state’s own posting says no action can be taken on any filing until a new ombudsman exists.

Asked about it in March 2026, Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s office told the Concord Monitor that nobody had applied for the job. The office did not say whether she was looking. She had imposed a hiring freeze on state agencies while continuing to nominate people to other senior posts. Fourteen months on, she has nominated no one to this one. A law with a five-day deadline now has no referee.

Part First, Article 14 promises every person a remedy for injuries and says nobody should have to buy it. Article 8 says the public’s access to government records shall not be unreasonably restricted. Today the only route to enforce that access is a petition in Superior Court, which is exactly the purchase Article 14 says you should not have to make.

Where the complaint is wrong, and where it is worse

This country was not designed for corporate profit. I checked the National Archives transcripts of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the later amendments. The word corporation appears in none of them. What the designers protected was property, including property in human beings, whom they counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of handing their owners more seats in Congress. They built a Senate and an electoral college to slow majorities down. The corporate capture came later, through statute and through money, and in every generation since. A flaw in the design cannot be voted out. A capture can. Wrong on the origin, right on the result.

And we are not slaves. Say that to the man earning 86 cents a day in a prison laundry and see how it lands. You are not owned. You are financed, mortgaged, rated, and rented, and the difference between that and ownership is real. It is also the whole game. The founders’ word was better: slavish. It describes a posture, and a posture can be changed.

The line about the best slaves believing they are free is older than the internet. Goethe wrote a version of it in 1809, in the diary pages of Elective Affinities: no one is more a slave than the person who thinks himself free without being so. He meant the mind. He could have meant a mortgage.

Now the rebuttal, because it is real. New Hampshire posts the lowest official poverty rate of any state, 7.2 percent, and a median household income near six figures. Nobody stopped this article, and nobody will stop you from sharing it, voting on it, or running for the House on a $200 salary and winning. Those freedoms are real.

They also answer nothing on this ledger. A freedom you cannot afford to use is a freedom on paper, and the men who wrote Article 10 had a word for the citizen who mistook the paper for the thing.

So here is the accounting. The minimum wage is set by the Legislature. The ombudsman’s budget was cut by the Legislature. The nomination to refill that seat belongs to the governor. The bail rules, the court fees, the housing statutes, and the school-funding formula all sit in Concord, in buildings you can walk into. Live Free or Die is stamped on the plates. The ledger is stamped in the statutes. Read both, then decide which one you are going to do something about.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the sources named in the fact-check table before publication. Caveats: the prison-wage figures come from the Prison Policy Initiative’s 2017 national compilation, which the group still cites as its newest; the state student-debt ranking is the Institute for College Access & Success’s last published state comparison, for the Class of 2020; the 2025 union figures exclude October because of the federal shutdown, per BLS; the housing affordability arithmetic is the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute’s, built on Realtors, New Hampshire Housing, and Census data; the lobbying total is OpenSecrets’ analysis of federal disclosures. The ombudsman account rests on the statute, the state’s own posting, and reporting by the Concord Monitor and the New Hampshire Bulletin; the governor’s office is quoted through the Monitor’s March 2026 reporting. Disclosure: Granite State Report has its own unresolved Right-to-Know matters with New Hampshire police departments. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.