Me at ten, waiting for the cops to arrive. Either those zucchini squash are huge, or I’m small.

Over at the Ace of Spades HQ, Ace is having deep thoughts about how, more and more, we assume that we need permission from the government to do anything. Not just that we actually need permission, which is more and more true, but that we just automatically assume that we do—and what that means, which is that more and more we innovate less.

I grew up on the East Coast. For a while, I lived in California.

I was blown away to learn that people could just start bonfires on the beach, whenever they liked.

Then I started to think like this: What kind of a mind-screw did they do on me when I should be surprised that people would be allowed to do this?

You see what I mean? My default mental state, thanks to the more statist area I grew up in (at least as far as bonfires) was that of course I wasn’t permitted by The State to build a bonfire and enjoy it.

And this is where I begin to get angry:

How much of each of our current mental landscapes are shaped by government such that we internalize the idea that the basic right to be left alone doesn’t exist?

I had a similar conversation recently with a friend about whether something should be legal or illegal. She wanted the government to just stay out of it, but could not comprehend that this meant it would be legal. “Legal” to her meant that the government approves of it, not that the government stays out of it and it was impossible to get the dictionary definition across—if the government doesn’t make it illegal, it’s legal. She didn’t want it to be illegal, and she didn’t want it to be legal, because in each case it meant that the government was involved in it.

I’ve thought about this before a lot, too, mostly in the service of free-time play. I think a large part of it has to do with discouraging, overburdening, and sometimes outright outlawing free play for kids. Things that are forbidden to children are eventually forbidden to adults, because the adults are no longer prepared to meet those situations freely.

It’s not just us as kids bringing pocket knives to school, as people talk about in the comments, although that’s a big part of it. That was responsibility: we were assumed to be responsible enough to carry knives, and they were useful things to have. We also played with chemistry sets and rocket engines and science experiment books that would freak out any modern authority figure if seen today. If we were really geeky we talked with strangers, including strange foreigners, long hours into the night on a shortwave radio. I spent hours alone programming an archaic computer simply because that’s what I wanted to do.

Along with time for free play, however, is also time and incentive for getting independent jobs. Because the flip side of all those weird things we did is that we were able to work to do them. If our parents chose not to give us the money to buy something (a radio, a computer, a rifle), we had the option of working all summer to save up our own money for the purchase. We didn’t need any permission for that. We barely even needed to fill out forms.¹ I’m sure I must have filled out a form to get a paper route, but I never filled out any paperwork to mow someone’s lawn or babysit their kids or even write computer programs for computer magazines.

When I return to the small town I grew up in I don’t see kids handling the paper route, I see adults. Fewer and fewer kids signed up for it; eventually, in 2008, the Muskegon Chronicle stopped accepting anyone under 18 for their routes.

This change doesn’t just apply to the more formal jobs like getting a paper route. I don’t see kids mowing lawns for money either. And given the stories of kids being hit by governments for opening lemonade stands I’m not surprised I see fewer of them actually going into a real business using dangerous equipment.² The jobs I do see them getting are good jobs for kids to do, but they tend to be ones where all they do is take orders; they’re not building their own business with a customer list and having to keep a record of expenses and revenues. They only initiative they’re taking is in filling out the form.

But what kids don’t do, the adult they become won’t understand as well.