THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, May 20, 1995 TAG: 9505190030
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: George Herbert
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
The first representative legislative assembly to meet on American soil. That is what Gov. George Yeardley convened in the church at Jamestown on July 30, 1619. And in one of its first deliberative actions, that body struck an odd note - more than one, even - for some of us reading today about the event.
Right off the bat, the assembled delegates set the price of tobacco. And this was a big deal, recorded as such in the proceedings of the session and given prominent attention in various histories of the event, one of which Adventurers of Purse and Person, Meyer & Dorman) I happened to be browsing through recently.
Nowadays, we look upon free markets as virtually a part of the definition of political freedom. Progress toward free-market economies, for instance, are part of what we in the West are pushing for, with respect to the former components of the Soviet Union, as proof of their democratic conversion.
Today, too, we have urgent health reasons for opposing the use of tobacco, the encouragement of which - for a stable return to the early Virginia growers - would flow inevitably from that first assembly's decision.
Granted (1): There have been lapses aplenty since Colonial days in our basic capitalist/democratic insistence upon noninterference by the political authorities in commerce. We've had emergency periods of price- and wage-fixing, as well as much direct and indirect manipulation of the economy (tobacco production, still) in ways that make the marketplace considerably less than free.
Granted (2): Tobacco had become one of the keys to survival of the colony and the equivalent of money. Wrote Rogers Dey Whichard in his History of Lower Tidewater Virginia: ``. . . it (tobacco) was at the same time both currency or medium of exchange and the principal exported commodity.'' Anyone will concede that regulation of ``currency,'' in free countries or anywhere else, is a legitimate, even essential, function of government.
Granted (3): In the 17th century (although tobacco was being described by detractors as that ``noxious weed''), the full scientific case for its harm to users and incidental breathers would not be made for a few hundred years yet.
Still and all, for a breakthrough legislative body, opening the gates to such a free and enlightened new human era, the fixing of a price on tobacco, as a first order of business, clouded an important page of history with some ironies. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
by CNB