Daylight Saving Time May Soon Be Stable
On July 14, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act (H.R. 139) by a 308-117 vote, advancing a bill to make daylight saving time permanent nationwide. States could opt out, but the federal government would standardize “spring forward” as the new normal year-round. Proponents tout more evening light, but should the federal government be manipulating fundamental aspects of human experience for convenience, revenue, or control?
Daylight saving time originated as government intervention. First widely implemented during World War I to squeeze more labor out of workers, it arbitrarily shifts clocks to suit bureaucratic or economic goals rather than natural solar cycles.
Redefining Reality
Government has been prioritizing revenue over biological reality for years. In the 1893 U.S. Supreme Court case Nix v. Hedden, justices ruled that tomatoes are vegetables, not fruits. Botanically, a tomato is a fruit (i.e., it develops from the ovary of a flowering plant and contains seeds). However, the Tariff Act of 1883 imposed a 10-percent tax on imported foreign vegetables, while fruits could be imported tax-free. SCOTUS saw dollar signs and unanimously rejected indisputable truth.
Legal definitions follow suit. “Insanity” is a legal construct for criminal responsibility, distinct from clinical mental-illness diagnoses in psychiatry. A person can be mentally ill without qualifying as legally insane, and vice versa. The state creates its own standard for accountability, separate from authoritative psychiatric designations.
Additional examples abound. The government has redefined marriage, gender, and even vaccines through legislation and regulation. It declares certain substances safe or dangerous based on policy, not science. These acts assert the state’s power to construct social “truths” unmoored from actual baseline reality.
Corporate Personhood/Fictive Persons
At root lies the legal fiction of the state as a “corporate person.” Corporate personhood — tracing to cases such as Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) and expanded in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) — treats artificial entities as rights-bearing “persons.” According to Anna Grzymala-Busse, in her book Sacred Foundations, nation-states borrowed the concept of fictive personhood from the Catholic Church. The Church first made the assertion that it had a separate existence and identity, over and above the people in it. “The notion of a fictive person,” writes Grzymala-Busse, “was first commonly used by the papacy as part of its eleventh-century quest for autonomy…. The fiction of a corporation was a useful one…. By 1250, English barons thought of themselves not only as members of a feudal hierarchy but also of a corporate entity.”
Universities today exist as fictive persons. For instance, Harvard is still Harvard — even if the entire staff and student body are different over the course of time. It has a separate identity over and above the individuals in it.
The modern decoupling of the state from the people inside it might be construed as dangerous, given the fact that a republic derives from the Latin res publica, meaning “the people’s thing.” Without the people, there is no state. It’s tantamount to naming something a “forest” that has no trees.
Likewise with corporate personhood. The assertion is that corporations should have the same rights as a human being, though notably without any of the same responsibilities. The German philosopher Georg Hegel famously said, “There are no rights without responsibilities, no responsibilities without rights.”
Blurring the Lines
But this axiom has been turned on its head by a government that increasingly sees itself as decoupled not only from its own people, but from reality itself. This allows government to act as creator and arbiter, eroding natural rights, commonly understood definitions, and ordered liberty.
When the state manipulates clocks, classifications, or definitions to fit its purposes, it blurs the lines between servant and master. Truly limited government respects objective reality and the common meaning of words — it doesn’t remake the dictionary (or alter space and time) to suit short-sighted policy objectives and evade accountability.
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