On June 22, 1774, the Quebec Act received royal assent. This, the climax of the Intolerable Acts, not only provided for greater accommodation of Catholicism and French law in Britain’s recently conquered colony of Quebec but also expanded its borders—to include virtually all of the trans-Appalachian West down to the Ohio River. It cut the possibility of further American settlement and expansion in a broad realm of Indian territory.
It was understood by the colonists as a scheme to limit the further growth of colonial American power—and to impose arbitrary French law to the American West in lieu of English liberty. As Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence, it was a grievance important enough to justify revolution: “For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies.” And whatever the motivations, it was taken to cripple the future prosperity of the American nation. A nation that could not grow could not thrive.
The closest modern analog to the Quebec Act is the Biden administration’s various attempts to straitjacket Israel so as to restrict further settlement of the West Bank. But, of course, Israel is not de jure a colony of the U.S. Yet American citizens do face an extraordinary and growing panoply of restrictions on their free use of the continent, which we gained by independence from Great Britain and—among other effects—the abolition of the Quebec Act as an inhibition on our westward expansion.
Much of the American West still belongs to the federal government, whether in the form of national parks, national forests, or some other ownership of land. The federal government always possessed a veto on Westerners’ use of most of the land in their states; increasingly, it exercises it.
Our labyrinth of environmental laws intrudes the federal government into ever-wider swathes of land it does not formally own. Say the federal government reintroduces wolves to a new section of the country—the laws protecting endangered species then make the federal government the overseer of every property owner who lives in a wolf’s howling range. Every environmental law is a present or future shackle on the free use of private property.
Federal housing policy, above all, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, makes the government the bureaucratic overseer of every suburb in America.
I could multiply the bureaucratic regulations ad nauseam. All serve, in the end, to inhibit affordable family formation—to make it more expensive to marry, raise children, and live decently. The Quebec Act was intolerable because it threatened to make affordable family formation impossible for all Americans. We have a thousand laws and regulations that make up a new Quebec Act, inhibiting our own affordable family formation—our prosperity and the prosperity of our posterity—for generations.
N’est-ce pas intolerable?
Image by William Robert Shepherd — Wikimedia Commons & Internet Archive Book Images — Flickr & Edited by Jared Gould
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