The Honest Labor Amendment would disqualify candidates like Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama because only those candidates who had performed sufficient honest labor would qualify.
Let’s first define what we are calling honest labor. Honest labor complies with honest laws, competes with other honest labor, and is voluntarily exchanged with another individual who voluntarily traded the fruits of his own honest labor.
Now let’s explore what is not honest labor.
By definition, governments spend money they either borrowed, printed out of thin air, or collected from other people by force. Governments also tend to forbid competition with their services. Governments ban the fruits of some labor, subsidize other labor, and even force us to buy some products and services. Governments even compel people to serve in their military. Therefore, any labor performed for a government is not honest labor.
The legal profession is a special case. Everyone knows it has a dishonest reputation and is intimately dependent on government, but perhaps more important is that about 90% of Congress has a law degree, and Congress has an approval rating of 11%, and our goal is to improve Congress …
Even work done by private sector doctors is not honest labor because doctors are protected from competition.
Volunteer work is also not honest labor because even those rare volunteer jobs that avoid the taint of government are not a two-way trade.
Therefore, very few people actually perform honest labor, but we don’t have to be purists to make an effective amendment. The Honest Labor Amendment merely needs to be fair, effective, and enforceable.
The Honest Labor Amendment
No one shall qualify for the Congress or for the office of the President of these United States without having first performed 10 years of labor separate from government and independent of individuals and organizations receiving government funding.