In February, the South Carolina House passed a sweeping parental rights bill by a vote of 116 to 1, with the lone no vote coming from a Republican who thought it did not go far enough. Six months later, the bill remains parked in the Senate Education Committee, and the families it is meant to protect are still waiting on a body that has not even scheduled a floor vote.

In March, Finland's Supreme Court convicted a sitting member of parliament of a hate crime over a church pamphlet she co-wrote in 2004, more than two decades before the verdict came down. In December, European regulators fined Elon Musk's X platform 120 million euros, roughly 140 million dollars, under the Digital Services Act. Together, the two rulings preview where America's own trust and safety regulatory impulse leads if conservatives let it go unchallenged.

The oldest labor law in human history is not a labor law at all. It is a creation account. Genesis says God worked six days and rested the seventh, and Exodus 20 turns that rest into a commandment binding on every household, servant, and animal under it. Rest was not a productivity concession. It was built into the order of things before the first economy ever existed. Germany is now debating whether it can still afford to keep that commandment on the books, and losing.

Governments have wanted to know who owns what for about as long as governments have existed. Caesar Augustus ordered the whole Roman world registered so it could be taxed, the story that puts a pregnant woman on a donkey to Bethlehem in the Gospel of Luke. Rome wanted names attached to property because names attached to property are names you can tax, conscript, and control. That instinct never went away. It just got better paperwork.