The police in Florida are busy this week. They’re conducting their quarterly crackdown on unlicensed trade workers. Sherriff’s departments have been running sting operations, with undercover officers and volunteers posing as customers luring contractors into a house with jackbooted thugs poised to arrest.
This pleases the bigots – since most of the unlicensed workers are also Illegal Immigrants – and tightens the grip of the state-approved cartels. Everybody wins! Well, everybody except the general public forced to pay inflated prices and the poor folks trying to make an honest living by providing services without jumping through the regulatory hoops required for a government permission slip.
The fine people at the Broward Sheriff’s Office are so pleased with their work (they arrested 15 unlicensed contractors on Tuesday and Wednesday!) that they’ve shared with the media a video of one such sting in a house rigged with hidden cameras (hat tip to Voodoo Chile in the Agora! group of Free Agents Social):
Not only are these thugs arresting peaceful and productive people down on their luck, they also feel the need to point guns at and handcuff someone showing no indication of aggression, or even resistance. Stories like this are depressingly common, but seeing the sting and hearing the opinions of both sides is quite moving. The cops are so righteously indifferent to the plight of those whose lives they are destroying and the victims are so unguardedly honest. “Nobody wants to hire me because there’s no work now,” says the arrested man, “I need to work, and I don’t know what to do.”
I’m sure future historians will be fascinated by this sort of footage. Imagine if we had similar access to the views of cruelly righteous SS agents and downtrodden Jews during the holocaust.
Brad Taylor is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He blogs at 
Fun fact I neglected to put in the post: the guy posing as the customer is a state-licensed electrician. There’s a paper by Hall and Deardorff “lobbying as legislative subsidy” [pdf] arguing that special interests influence on policy by subsidizing sympathetic legislators, rather than outright bribery. This guy is doing that with law enforcement
That is EXACTLY what I have to deal with around here. THANK YOU for posting this!
Might I recommend: Unlicensed Contracting Work
Ahhhhh, man, had a good article going and then you Godwin’d it. Don’t always go for the Nazi connection, there are plenty of other dictators that did as bad or worse. Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, the list goes on. The Nazi example is used too often, not enough people have exposure to all the other terrible people in history, they think the Third Reich was an isolated incident.
The fact that everyone knows and understands the holocaust is what makes it a useful point of reference. I’m all for using the most salient examples from history to highlight particular aspects of what’s happening now, even if in a much more moderated form.