Regulatory State

On this day:

1755
French and Indian War: The French surrender Fort Beauséjour to the British, leading to the expulsion of the Acadians.
1816
Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his four house guests at the Villa Diodati, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, and inspires his challenge that each guest write a ghost story, which culminated in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein, John Polidori writing the short story The Vampyre, and Byron writing the poem Darkness.
1858
Abraham Lincoln delivers his House Divided speech in Springfield, Illinois.
1871
The University Tests Act allows students to enter the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham without religious tests (except for those intending to study theology).
1904
Irish author James Joyce begins a relationship with Nora Barnacle and subsequently uses the date to set the actions for his novel Ulysses; this date is now traditionally called “Bloomsday”. Barnacle. She must have been quite a woman to overcome that name with a word guy like him.
1940
World War II: Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain becomes Chief of State of Vichy France (Chef de l'État Français).
1963
Soviet Space Program: Vostok 6 Mission – Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space.

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"Some hold that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by him, but by another fellow of the same name."--Mamet. A truly funny, complex line.

 
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Iran and Israel are not officially at war. Why is that?

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The Pirates are the lowest-scoring team in baseball. Analytics are great, but it seems they may not be a formula.

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The Middle East conflict will not be resolved until the decision is made whether to use U.S. bunker-busters. What will be interesting is if the U.S. is not given the easy decision as a result of Iran attacking--purposely or accidentally--U.S. sites or personnel. Behavior of death cults are difficult to predict.

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Regulatory State

In his book, George Washington, Entrepreneur, John Berlau warns of the dangers of “regulation without representation” – and argues that the entrepreneurial George Washington shared that same fear. He documents George Washington’s amazing entrepreneurship and innovation. Starting out from a humble background compared to the other Founders and lacking resources for a college education, Washington became an apprentice surveyor for the neighboring Fairfax family at 16. He quickly built a lucrative freelance surveying practice and speculated in real estate by purchasing or asking for compensation in some of the undeveloped land he surveyed.

Decades later—after he acquired Mount Vernon due to the untimely deaths of his older brother Lawrence and Lawrence’s family—Washington abandoned tobacco as the farm’s cash crop, diversified into wheat and dozens of other crops, and built a grist mill to sift flour that he would export throughout the colonies, to the West Indies and Great Britain. Washington would put his name on these bags of flour, essentially trademarking the flour with the “G. Washington” imprint on the bags to differentiate it from his competitors, pioneering the practice of branding we have today. In addition, he turned Mount Vernon into what historian Harlow Giles Unger called in his book, The Unexpected George Washington, “a vast agro-industrial enterprise” that included a blacksmith shop to make tools such as horseshoes and nails and a mini textile factory to make clothing, the latter of which was run largely by Martha Washington. Mount Vernon has since rebuilt the grist mill and whiskey distillery that Washington had placed near the grist mill after he was president.

But these very ventures pulled Washington into the vortex of regulation that the British Parliament foisted upon the American colonies. The red tape stemmed especially from mercantilist trade policies. The Navigation Act of 1651 gave Great Britain complete control of trade routes for the colonies, which meant that colonists officially could only export and import goods with the mother country.

With limited trade routes and high shipping costs for goods from Britain, colonists began to produce their own items and grow their own crops, just as Washington did with his ventures at Mount Vernon. The Industrial Revolution started gaining traction in Great Britain during the eighteenth century and also made its way to the colonies on a small scale, thanks to the efforts of individual entrepreneurs like Washington.

But Parliament saw colonial manufacturing upstarts like the enterprises at Mount Vernon as a threat to British manufacturers, despite how small they were in comparison. Parliament passed laws such as the Iron Act, Hat Act, and Wool Act to restrict or ban colonial entrepreneurs from making everything from nails and horseshoes to hats and wool carpets.

Taxation has been limited in certain situations--like religion--because inherent in taxation is its ability to destroy. It allows those taxed to be crushed or molded for the benefit of others, often the writer of the law.

Regulation is molding and destruction by other means. Why are we not similarly cautious about it?