I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
Categories
Oliver Cromwell
Author: Redactor
Categories
Yves Guyot
“It is not the astronomer’s business to consider whether it would be better if the sun were nearer or farther from the earth, or if he turned round her, instead of turning round him. Nor is it the chemist’s business to consider whether carbonic acid and carbonic oxide are noxious gases that ought not to exist. It has never been thought desirable to make Newton responsible for tiles falling on the people’s heads.
“Economists, however, are held answerable for the laws which they discover.”
Yves Guyot, The Principles of Social Economy (1892).
Categories
Ford Labor
On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day’s labor.
Categories
Oliver Cromwell
A few honest men are better than numbers.
Categories
King Charles
On Jan. 4, 1642, King Charles I of England sent soldiers to arrest members of Parliament, beginning England’s slide into civil war.
On Jan. 4, 1649, the English “Rump Parliament,” having purged those members willing to restore Charles I to the throne, voted to put Charles I on trial for high treason. Before the month was over, the king had been executed.
Categories
Rep. Craig
On January 3, 1933, Minnie D. Craig became the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first female to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States.
On the same date in 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated.
January 3rd birthdays include that of Cicero (106 BC), Roman philosopher and theorist of republicanism, and J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 AD), English philologist and author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Both were deeply concerned about the problem of absolute power.
Categories
John Taylor
I renounce the idea sometimes advanced that the state governments ever were or continue to be, sovereign or unlimited. If the people are sovereign, their governments cannot also be sovereign.
John Taylor of Caroline, as quoted in Walter E. Volkomer, ed., The Liberal Tradition in American Thought (G. P. Putnam Sons, 1969)
Categories
Fourth to Ratify
On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.
The Panic of 1819, the first major peacetime financial crisis in the United States, begins. The classic historical treatment of this crisis is Murray Rothbard’s dissertation.
Categories
Robert Nozick
Is not the minimal state, the framework for utopia, an inspiring vision?
The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual rights with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we choose, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less.
Categories
Slave Trade
On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.