Ok - then you totally misunderstand the issue. Being landlocked in Missouri, that is understandable. You probably have no idea how the interests of the commercial fishermen conflict with the issue of almost every other “family business” that would also like to simply “carry on making their living so that they can have going concerns for generations.”
What makes the interests of a few commercial fishermen superior to the interests of all the many many thousands of family businesses who will suffer if the sport fishing industry is dead? That’s the part of the equation that you don’t understand about coastal economies - again, understandable since Missouri doesn’t have a coastal economy.
That’s my point. The commercial fishery is dying due to over fishing, and taking the entire sport fishing industry down with it. Something must be done to save all of it. I do not know if this piece of legislation is right or not, but I do know this: this is not anything like a simple enviro left versus business right argument. This is nothing like a property rights versus bureaucrat issue. It just is not that simple.
Well, that's kind of a different kettle of fish (no pun intended) than how it was presented. The objective seemed to be simply to keep the economic activity associated with harvesting those fish entirely within the state as much as possible, and to make it as expensive as possible and require as many people as possible to be involved in the effort of harvesting those fish just to create that economic activity.