Elbow Room for a Free People — Minding The Campus

On June 22, 1774, the Quebec Act received royal assent. This, the culmination of the Intolerable Acts, not only allowed for greater accommodation of Catholicism and French law in the recently conquered British colony of Quebec, but also expanded its borders – to include virtually all of the trans-Appalachian west as far as ‘to the Ohio River. This reduced the possibility of further American colonization and expansion into a large area of ​​Indian Territory.

The colonists saw it as a plan to limit the future growth of American colonial power and to impose arbitrary French law on the American West instead of English freedom. As Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence, this was a grievance important enough to justify revolution: “For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing there an arbitrary government and to enlarge its frontiers in such a manner as to render it both an example and a suitable instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies. And whatever the motivations, it was intended to cripple the future prosperity of the American nation. A nation that cannot grow cannot prosper.

The closest modern analogue to the Quebec law lies in the Biden administration’s various attempts to straitjacket Israel in order to restrict further settlement in the West Bank. But of course, Israel is not de jure a colony of the United States. Yet American citizens face an extraordinary and growing array of restrictions on their free use of the continent, which we achieved through independence from Great Britain and, among other effects, the abolition of the Americas Act. Quebec as an inhibition of our westward expansion.

Much of the American West is still owned by the federal government, whether in the form of national parks, national forests, or some other type of land ownership. The federal government has always had a veto over Western use of most of their states’ lands; more and more, he exercises it.

Our maze of environmental laws encroaches on the federal government into ever-larger territories that do not officially belong to it. Suppose the federal government reintroduces wolves to a new part of the country: laws protecting endangered species then make the federal government the overseer of every landowner living in the wolf howling zone. Any environmental law constitutes a present or future obstacle to the free use of private property.

Federal housing policy, and especially the positive promotion of fair housing, makes the government the bureaucratic overseer of every American suburb.

I could multiply bureaucratic regulations to satiation. All of this ultimately serves to prevent affordable family formation – to make it more expensive to marry, raise children, and live a decent life. The Quebec law was intolerable because it threatened to make it impossible for all Americans to create a family at an affordable cost. We have a thousand laws and regulations that constitute a new Quebec law, preventing our own affordable family formation – our prosperity and that of our posterity – for generations.

Isn’t this intolerable?

Image by William Robert Shepherd — Book Images Wikimedia Commons and Internet Archive — Flickr and edited by Jared Gould