When the ordinance is the weapon

Reason reports that on July 28, 1880, San Francisco enacted an ordinance prohibiting the operation of laundries in wooden buildings without the consent of its board of supervisors. On its surface, the rule sounds like plain fire-safety sense — wood burns, and a city full of open stoves and steam irons has reason to worry. I spent enough years as a printer, surrounded by oil and paper and open flame, to have genuine sympathy for fire codes.

But the devil, as always, lives in the enforcement. By inference from the historical record — not from what Reason's brief item alone tells us — the board granted consent to nearly every white applicant and denied it to nearly every Chinese applicant, though both groups operated from the same wooden structures under the same physical risks. The law was neutral; its administration was not. The instrument of commerce regulation became an instrument of exclusion.

This is precisely the corruption I warned against in the matter of paper money: when the authority that issues the instrument is answerable to no discipline, it will inevitably serve the issuer's convenience rather than the public's welfare. A board of supervisors with unchecked discretion over who may earn a living is no different in kind from a bank with unchecked discretion over who may borrow. Both will favor the familiar and persecute the foreign.

The Supreme Court eventually heard the case as Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) and ruled that the equal and impartial protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws — that discriminatory administration of a facially neutral law violates the Constitution as surely as discriminatory text would. That ruling, by inference and historical reputation, became one of the great anchors of the Equal Protection Clause. It is the kind of precedent a printer's apprentice could understand: what you do with the rule matters as much as what the rule says.

I confess I did not always live up to this principle in my own life, and I name that failure plainly. I held enslaved people for a portion of my years, and no ledger of scientific achievement or postal reform pays that debt. What redeemed the direction of my later years was the recognition that liberty is not a local franchise — it belongs to every person who labors and breathes and seeks to build a life. The Chinese laundry operators of San Francisco were doing exactly what I preached: rising early, working hard, saving, serving customers. The city's answer was to hold a veto over their livelihood based on who they were rather than what they did.

The counsel a working person can use today: Whenever a licensing board, a zoning commission, or any administrative body holds broad discretion over who may operate a business, ask who actually receives approval and who does not — and whether the pattern matches any feature other than merit. Discretion without accountability is a tool waiting to be abused. Demand that consent be given or denied in writing, with reasons stated, so that the record can be read and the pattern seen. Sunlight, I have always maintained, is the best disinfectant — and the only one that costs nothing.