New Hampshire Finds Its Faded Live Free Or Die Voice In Inspection Stickers

By Alice Giordano

A  proposal to ban inspection stickers in New Hampshire is a glimmer of hope that the state’s Live Free or Die motto is not just an empty pledge of liberty.

Afterall, based on personal experience, it is a state where family court judges blatantly thieve homes, police exact retribution against reporters who exposed their corruption,  state-appointed guardians steal the elderly from their families and stick them in squalid trailers with no hot water, and motorists get caught in the web of some of the most egregious predatory towing tactics in the nation.

Efforts to fix those problems have been mostly eclipsed by New Hampshire’s league of greedy gatekeepers who depend on a depraved system counting on government apathy and/or its  complicity.

House Bill 649, a Republican-led legislation, has revealed that the inspection sticker has its own special set of self-serving stewards. Of those who recently testified against the pending bill are  none other than  tow companies, mechanics, and dealerships —  the profiteers of the inspection sticker cottage industry.

Most tow companies in New Hampshire, in fact,  also fix cars — as in the ones that didn’t pass inspection.

Good thing I don’t drink milk, because it would have come out of my nose as I read comments Jim Bailey, owner of Bailey’s Towing & Auto Body, somehow made with a straight face against ending inspection stickers. “I understand the economy’s tight and everything, but at what cost do we jeopardize safety?” he emoted at a recent hearing on the bill.

More milk-snorting testimony came from  Rockingham County Sheriff Chuck Massahos whose family just so happens to own a car repair business.

No lie. I had finished doling out (you might want to sit down for this) $300 for a nine-mile tow and another $613 for a 59-mile tow, all in the Live Corrupt or Die state of New Hampshire.

I was in the middle of nowhere late at night essentially being held hostage by sketchy characters in the mafia-like tow business and was asking myself a different version of Bailey’s question — is the money so important to this unscrupulous racket that it’s worth jeopardizing my safety?

New Hampshire’s leftist media has unsurprisingly done a lousy job at best covering the inspection sticker controversy.

It has so far failed to mention, for example, that out of the only 13 states that still require annual inspection stickers, only five of them are Republican — and all FIVE of those states – have either pending bills or recently passed bills to end — yup — mandatory inspection stickers.

New Hampshire makes six and the underdog state of Maine also has a pending bill to get rid of the blackmailish mandate.

That leaves sticker extortion to the deep blue regions of New England and a scatter of other Democrat-run states.

End the NH Inspection Sticker Scam — formed to bolster the  bill has it absolutely right — those so desperate to hold the ransom of inspection stickers over the head of motorists are nothing more than, as the grassroots group called it “a parade of rent-seeking mechanics and stealerships.”

And not to be forgotten is the colossal amount of money the New Hampshire government generates in issuing tickets to sticker violators. That, of course, translates into revenue for the insurance companies, who will up your premium after learning from big brother what an inspection sticker scofflaw you are.

Moreover, where was all this concern about road safety when illegals were running over pedestrians in crosswalks, driving down the wrong side of the road, and driving through Stop signs because they don’t know a stitch of English.

Oh, that’s right, there’s no money to be had in protesting those “jeopardies” to our safety.

Eons ago when I was a beat reporter — which was of all places in New Hampshire where my life as a victim of government retaliation was born as well as confined to — I covered many car accidents.

I can’t remember a single one even remotely related to or caused by  a check engine light  or a pinhole leak in the manifold.

I did sit outside a club run by a well-known fraternal organization on a stakeout with a Portsmouth city official where we watched one drunk cop after the next stumble to their car. Now, that was definitely a safety risk.

In fact, according to the New Hampshire Department of Safety, which incidentally opposes eliminating inspection stickers, out of the 135 fatal motor vehicle crashes in 2024 in the Granite State, the vast majority were caused by impaired drivers —  not impaired cars.

To boot, according to the Cleveland Clinic, one of the top phobia people suffer from is vehophobia, a fear of car accidents. So that ups the already high probability that people are pretty apt to fix a car rather than drive a dangerous one. They just don’t want to pay $1,000 to change a burnt out lightbulb or otherwise drive home consumed with capiophobia — the fear of cops.

There is also just no guarantee that a car inspected today is a safe car tomorrow.

Usually in New Hampshire, the gatekeepers win out. But this time — it just might be different. The bill was passed by the House by a wide 212 to 143 margin. It goes before the Republican-dominated Senate on April 8.

The citizen drive for the bill is also unprecedented, drawings hundreds if not thousands of posts in support of it on social media.

It also seems to have revived the Live Free or Die spirit of New Hampshire in conservative lawmakers who lately have been conspicuously aloof in the region’s lone purple state.

In fact main bill sponsor Republican Mike Granger put the need to be liberated from the government imposition, super simple: “vehicle safety inspections are a scam.”

Maybe New Hampshire motorists, at least, will be able to live free or die.

Alice Giordano is an investigative reporter for Newsmax Magazine, a contributor to The Federalist, and a conservative commentator for Newsweek’s Topic of The Day. She is formerly of The Epoch Times, Associated Press, and The Boston Globe.