Imagine if you will, that you’re a Victorian mother standing in the doorway of her daughter's room.
You are genuinely alarmed.
Your daughter is seventeen, perfectly healthy, bright, beautiful, popular amongst her peers, and… completely absorbed in a novel. She doesn’t even notice you standing there watching her.
It’s not that the book she’s reading is inappropriate. It isn’t that the lighting is low and you’re worried about her eyes. No, you are worried because your doctor has told you that too much reading drains a woman's finite mental energy, can drive her to madness, and may even leave her infertile.
Yes. I’m being serious. And no, this was not a fringe opinion.
Doctors wrote papers on it, and parents took it seriously.
The hysteria wasn’t confined to parenting or novels either.
In 1906, the British magazine Punch ran a cartoon of a woman and a man, each absorbed in the new wireless telegraph instead of talking to each other. The caption read: "These two figures are not communicating with one another."
Society was unraveling, clearly.
Around the same time, physicians were furiously diagnosing "railway madness"—a real clinical term for the mental deterioration they believed was caused by the jarring motion of locomotive travel.
One American traveler reportedly carried a loaded revolver on British trains because railway maniacs were supposedly everywhere.
Charles Dickens, after surviving an actual rail crash in 1865, white-knuckled every subsequent train journey to his children's embarrassment, which is honestly relatable, but also a little funny given that he was Charles Dickens.
In New York, people made New Year's resolutions to stop riding their bicycles so much after reading Dr. Arthur Shadwell’s "The Hidden Dangers of Cycling," (The National Review, Vol. 28, No. 168, 1897).
He coined the term "bicycle face" and wrote about the nervous strain cycling imposed on women.
He claimed that the bicycle forces riders into "set faces, eyes fixed before them, and an expression either anxious, irritable, or at best stony... to ride it safely entails a double strain—a general one on the nerves and a particular one on the balancing centre."
He genuinely believed this was a medical crisis.
It’s fun to look at stuff like this and laugh at how silly they were “back then”, but I’d caution us not to be too cocky. I don’t think the future will be kind to us, either.
Sure, the specific fear-of-the-new changes every generation, but the certainty of doom never does.
The problem is that fear of new things rarely just stays as fear.
It needs somewhere to go, it must be “managed” or “fixed” (somebody should do something!), and usually, it goes to politics.
In the 1810s, English textile workers known as the Luddites smashed power looms across Nottingham and Yorkshire because those machines threatened their livelihoods, and they couldn't see any other way forward. The Crown eventually deployed military force to stop them, and some of the leaders were executed or exiled.
The looms kept weaving, but a lesson was learned.
Two centuries later, French taxi drivers brought Paris to a standstill—burning tires, blocking roads, tipping cars—all to protest Uber, because they'd paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for government-issued medallions that gave them the legal right to do a job, and some tech startup from California had just made those medallions worthless.
Cities across America sympathized and responded with protectionist policies like caps on drivers, surcharges, outright bans—anything to slow the competition down.
Here in Utah, a woman named Jestina Clayton learned exactly how that works.
She grew up in Sierra Leone, where braiding hair is a cultural tradition. She started doing it as a small child and brought the skill with her when she came to America after fleeing a civil war. In 2006, she started a small braiding business in Utah to support her family while her husband finished school. She was good at it. After all, she'd been doing it longer than most cosmetology students had been alive.
One day she received an anonymous threat: someone was going to report her to the cosmetology board for braiding without a license. When she asked the state whether she actually needed one, she was told yes—a full cosmetology license requiring 2,000 hours of government-mandated training and thousands of dollars in tuition was required if she wanted to braid hair.
And oh, by the way, the cosmetology schools didn't even teach African hair braiding.
The cosmetology board in Utah was, by law, controlled by existing workers in the industry—people with every professional incentive to make it harder for newcomers to compete.
(That's not a coincidence… it's how these systems are designed.)
Jestina eventually sued with help from the Institute for Justice, and a federal judge struck down Utah's law as unconstitutional, ruling that the state's licensing scheme was "wholly irrational" and violated her right to earn an honest living.
Justina’s story is just one of thousands.
Every generation has been convinced its fears are the serious ones, the real ones, the ones that finally justify the intervention.
The Victorians were wrong about novels and trains.
The Luddites couldn't stop the power loom.
The French taxi unions couldn't stop Uber.
The cosmetologists couldn't stop Jestina.
Regulations claim to protect “the people,” but they always only protect the status quo.
We even wrote a book about it: The Tuttle Twins and the Food Truck Fiasco!
Of course, the answer has never been more government.
The answer has always been individuals and families—specifically, families strong enough to outlast bad systems.
Parents who raise kids to build something rather than wait for permission slips, and who teach them how to question whether a rule exists to protect people or to protect somebody's position.
Moms especially understand this in a way that's hard to articulate, because they're the ones doing the daily work of forming the people who are going to inherit whatever mess has been made by today’s petty tyrants and protectionists.
Strong families are the thing that makes government overreach expensive and difficult, which is probably why policy after policy for the past century has tried to get between parents and their children—more hours at school, more access to counselors and administrators, more programs that position the state as the default source of guidance for things that used to happen at home—they know what a strong family can do.
In honor of moms and everything they do for the rest of us—we're offering 20% off all bundles this week with code MOM20.
What we've built is more than just a home library or a homeschool curriculum. It's a jumping-off point for the most important conversations—the kind that give your kids the foundational framework, and the language to understand the complex ideas that most adults don’t even fully grasp.
Ideas like protectionism, government abuse of power, true entrepreneurship (and how it includes competition!), and the beauty and power of true personal responsibility and self-reliance. Ideas that inoculate them against the next generation of people who push so-called “good intentions” legislation to protect them from something that actually should be embraced.
Your kids are going to be the ones the powerful elite didn't account for.
Our job is to keep giving you the tools to build them up.
— Connor
